About
Civil engineer (MSc, offshore geotechnics) building engineering software.
I am a civil engineer based in İzmir, Türkiye, reading for an MSc in geotechnical engineering at İzmir Kâtip Çelebi University. My work sits where geotechnical engineering meets software: finite element formulations for soil, constitutive models, and the numerical machinery that has to implement them without quietly changing the answer.
What I work on
The main project is KATAI 2D, a finite element platform for two-dimensional geotechnical analysis under plane-strain and axisymmetric conditions. It covers deformation, stability, groundwater flow and consolidation, with linear elastic, Mohr-Coulomb and Hardening Soil constitutive models, and it is built around a commitment that shapes everything else: the formulation is stated openly, and every capability is checked against closed-form solutions by an automated suite that runs on each build.
Alongside it I work on smaller tools for geotechnical automation — the unglamorous path from a contractor's CPT file to a set of design parameters, which on most projects is still walked by hand through an untested spreadsheet. And occasionally on something further afield, like Nerve, an AI stack in a single C file, which exists largely because the same questions about determinism and reproducibility turn out to have the same answers in a different domain.
How I work
One idea runs through all of it. A result that cannot be reproduced, and whose derivation cannot be recovered, is not yet a result. In practice that means benchmarks with stated tolerances rather than claims of accuracy, deterministic numerics rather than whatever the platform happens to do, and tools that record which correlation and which coefficient produced a number rather than just the number.
It also means being specific in public. The articles here are written to be the best available answer to one narrow question each — how to read D₁₀, D₃₀ and D₆₀ off a grading curve, what a Mohr circle actually tells you — rather than to cover a subject broadly. Every number in them is recomputed by a script that runs on each build.
Research
My MSc research at İzmir Kâtip Çelebi University is on the geotechnics of offshore wind: floating foundation concepts, the anchoring and mooring systems that hold them in place, and structural health monitoring for installations far enough offshore that inspection is not a casual matter. It is a good problem to work on because the foundation is simultaneously the least accessible part of the structure and the part whose behaviour is hardest to predict.
- Offshore wind turbine foundations: floating concepts, anchoring and mooring systems
- Structural health monitoring for far-offshore installations
- Constitutive modelling of soils, and the numerical treatment of yield-surface singularities
- Verification methodology for engineering software
- Coupled consolidation and groundwater flow
- Reproducibility in engineering calculation
Contact
Email is best: [email protected]. I read corrections with more interest than compliments.
Elsewhere
- github.com/fkkarakurt
- orcid.org/0009-0009-0865-3958
- linkedin.com/in/fkkarakurt
- dev.to/fkkarakurt
- doi:10.5281/zenodo.20692282 — KATAI 2D scientific manual
A condensed CV is also available.