On March 11th 2017, Prof. Dianyun Zhang, graduate student Weijia Chen, and senior Mechanical Engineering students Meagan Ferreira and Nomin Munkhbat attended the “Women Take Flight” event hosted by the New England Air Museum located in Windsor Locks, CT. The event featured activities and presentations celebrating women’s contributions to aerospace history and technology.

Dr. Zhang represented UConn’s Mechanical Engineering department at the event to promote engineering to young children by showing new advancements. Specifically, the group demonstrated how composites are manufactured to the young boys and girls (as well as adults) who attended the event. Curious guests were shown that carbon fiber and the glass fiber are flexible and soft. Then they were asked if they could assess the composite panels, and if they believed they were made from those same materials. Guests were then told about the VARTM (vacuum assisted resin transfer molding) process, and exactly how those flexible fibers can become as tough as metal through curing. It was also explained how the composites are replacing airplane parts that generally use metal. (Contributed by Nomin Munkhbat and Meagan Ferreira)

The project entitled “Efficient Radiative Heat Transfer Modeling in Large-Scale Combustion Systems” will optimize the a legacy radiative heat transfer code from Prof. Zhao’s lab on the Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing processors. Currently Prof. Zhao is working with a graduate student (Peiyu Zhang) and an undergraduate student (Andrew Caratenuto) on test problems that are representative of the full-scale problems. Significant speedup has already been observed on knights landing using these test problems.

Prof. Julian Norato is developing computational techniques for welded plate structures in conjunction with Caterpillar, Inc. These techniques can be a powerful design tool to explore the design of structures from a blank sheet.

Dr. Norato with his student Shanglong Zhang, with funding from Caterpillar, are developing computational techniques for the design of structures made of welded plates, such as those encountered in large structures for heavy machinery and ship structures.

Their work is focused on topology optimization — a computational technique that determines the optimal spatial distribution of material within a space envelope to, for example, design the lightest structure that will not mechanically fail under applied loads.  This technique is a powerful engineering design tool to explore the design of structures starting from a blank sheet. Existing topology optimization techniques produce complex, organic designs that cannot be readily fabricated by welding plates.  In order to be most economical, this current process in many cases results in the production of large, strong structures typically made of steel. This is the case with the main structures of heavy machinery and ships.  Dr. Norato’s topology optimization method renders designs that are made exclusively of constant-thickness plates which can be welded, which greatly facilitates the translation of the topology optimization result to a design concept of the structure that is amenable to fabrication.

Prof. Xu Chen is the recipient of the UTC Institute for Advanced Systems Engineering’s Breakthrough Award, which recognizes innovative, transformational and disruptive contributions in the field of advanced systems engineering. Read more here.

Three recent grants have been awarded by the National Science Foundation to Prof. Horea Ilies to support the current research in his Computational Design Laboratory.

The ability to measure how well objects “fit together” is a key task in engineering design and manufacturing as well as in the broad scientific arena whenever the behavior and function of a system is dependent on proper geometric alignment. For example, assembly planning from macro to nanoscale, layout optimization and packaging, design for human variability, synthesis and self-assembly of nano-machines, novel drug design, comparative shape analysis (shape similarity), as well as personalized medicine and medical devices are all applications in which the system’s behavior and function depends on the proper geometric alignment of individual components. One of the grants, based on the work with Dr. Morad Behandish, focuses on developing a generic framework for geometric interfaceability in virtual product development aimed at quantifying and interpreting how well objects of arbitrary geometric complexity fit together. 

A second grant is exploring the extension of the geometric interfaceability framework to develop effective haptic interaction mechanisms for intelligent human-computer or human-robot systems with a focus on virtual assembly tasks. The research uses haptic devices, which add the sense of touch when interacting with digital models and simulations, and are used in a variety of research, industrial and consumer applications, from engineering design, to computer-assisted surgery, and gaming.

The latest NSF-grant received by Prof. Ilies, in collaboration with Dean Kazem Kazerounian, focuses on the systematic design, analysis and control of manufacturable nanomachines such as the nanorobots built from protein molecules. In this research, Profs. Ilies and Kazerounian aim to develop a theoretical and computational framework to systematically design, and analyze self-assemblable molecular machines with prescribed mobility and function obtained from a predefined library of molecular primitives. The research aims to develop the tools required to perform design space explorations for synthetic and controllable molecular machines and devices, potentially leading to novel molecular motor functions that can be used to develop smart nanorobots and materials.

A paper authored by Dr. Morad Behandish and Professor Horea Ilies placed 2^nd in the 2015 SIAM/ACM conference on Geometric and Physical Modeling. The conference, with a historically low acceptance rate below 30%, brings together applied mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers from academia and industry to exchange new ideas in relevant mathematical theory, geometric and physical modeling, analysis, simulation and processing, as well as various applications. The title of the paper presented with this award is “Analytic Methods for Geometric Modeling via Spherical Decomposition,” and has been published in the special issue of Computer-Aided Design, vol. 70, pp. 100-115, January 2016.

Previously, the two UConn researchers won two consecutive Best Paper Awards at the 2014 and 2015 Computers and Information in Engineering (CIE), which is part of the annual international ASME IDETC & CIE Conferences.

Prof. Michael T. Pettes is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award from the Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems (CBET) NSF Directorate for his proposal “CAREER: Understanding the Roles of Strain and Mass Disorder on Fundamental Thermal Transport Processes in Two-Dimensional Materials.” Read more in the UConn Today article.

Dr. Morad Behandinsh and Professor Horea Ilies won two consecutive Best Paper Awards at the 2014 and 2015 Computers and Information in Engineering (CIE), which is part of the annual international ASME IDETC & CIE Conferences. Their papers, titled “Peg in Hole Revisited: A Generic Force Model for Haptic Assembly,” and “Haptic Assembly Using Skeletal Densities and Fourier Transforms” were selected among the 143 and 130 papers, respectively, presented at the two CIE conferences.

The state-of-the-art in haptic-assisted virtual assembly is based on a distinction between two modes of function, namely, a free motion mode implemented with collision detection engines, and an insertion mode during which the software assists the user in the precision assembly task by providing geometric virtual constraints. The identification of the switch criteria between the two modes has been one of the open problems in virtual assembly of complex objects. The two UConn researchers have developed a novel technique to automatically detect the geometric constraints for assembly guidance using a generic force model that applies to objects of arbitrary shape. They showed that their approach creates the attraction forces and torques towards the assembly configuration corresponding to proper alignment as well as the repulsion forces and torques in case of collisions. Their work, supported by National Science Foundation, is the first one to unify the free motion and insertion modes during virtual assembly into a single functional mode for shapes of arbitrary complexity.

A(n Academic) Family Business

During the 2014 conference, the organizers of the flagship international event on Design Engineering, which is the ASME IDETC & CIE Conference, honored two other awardees that are closely connected to the UConn researchers.

Vadim Shapiro, the Bernard and Frances Weideman Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin received the Design Automation award for his outstanding contributions to geometric and physical modeling. Herb Voelcker, the Charles Lake Professor of Mechanical Engineering Emeritus at Cornell University received the CIE Lifetime Achievement Award to “recognize a person who has had a significant impact on the use of computers in engineering practice and/or education.” Shapiro is Ilies’ academic PhD advisor, and Voelcker is his academic grandfather, which makes the 3 different prizes awarded concurrently to this academic family for independently conducted research an extraordinary experience.