Data-Driven Multi-Scale Design of Engineering Materials under Uncertainty

Date: November 1, 2024; Time: 2:30 PM Location: PWEB 175

Abstract: The area of data-driven materials design has been garnering considerable interest due to the increasing need for high-performance materials in electronics, energy and structural applications, and extreme environments. The research on engineering materials and their manufacturing will potentially extend in the future to the development of new-generation composites, alloys, ceramics, and other materials for extreme environments such as hypersonics applications, fabrication of adaptive thermal response materials, energetic composites in fuel cells, thermal energy harvesting in satellites, and materials for green energy applications with the use of computational and data-driven design strategies.

In this talk, Dr. Acar will present an overview of the multi-scale computational methods developed by her research group to design metallic microstructures and mechanical metamaterials for enhanced mechanical performance. The talk will also discuss the impact of manufacturing-related uncertainty arising from the imperfections and defects during processing on the reliability and performance of these engineering materials. Additional topics will cover the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML) techniques into physics-informed material models to accelerate the design of material systems processed with conventional and additive manufacturing techniques.

Biographical Sketch: Dr. Pinar Acar is an Associate Professor at the Mechanical Engineering Department of Virginia Tech. Her research interests focus on multi-scale materials modeling, materials design, design optimization, uncertainty quantification, and machine learning. She received her Ph.D. degree in 2017 from the Aerospace Engineering Department of the University of Michigan. During her Ph.D., she developed various computational methods for studying the multi-scale modeling and design of metals under uncertainty.

Dr. Acar is the winner of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award, the Dean’s Awards of Excellence: Faculty Fellow and Outstanding New Assistant Professor Awards at Virginia Tech, Frontiers of Materials Award by The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS), and the International Amelia Earhart Fellowship, as well as the recipient of the best paper award in Non-Deterministic Approaches field in AIAA SciTech Forum 2022.  She is an elected member of technical committees in various professional societies, including the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS), The U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics (USACM), and The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).

Thermal Energy Storage for Grid Resilience

Date: October 18, 2024; Time: 2:30 PM Location: PWEB 175

Abstract: The energy sector is undergoing a major transformation.  More renewable energy resources are being added to the energy grid to replace aging fossil fuel power plants and meet growing demand.  However, these renewable energy resources are more intermittent and rely on favorable weather conditions to produce energy often resulting in a misalignment of energy generation and demand.  Thermal energy storage (TES) is a powerful tool to combat this misalignment.  This talk will discuss how TES can improve the resilience of the evolving energy grid.  Near-ambient temperature TES can complement building technologies to reduce building energy usage for heating and cooling, shift energy usage from on-peak to off-peak times, and extend the capabilities of existing building heating and cooling systems.  At elevated temperatures, TES can serve as a peaking resource delivering power to the grid by discharging high grade heat to a thermal power cycle when renewable generation drops or demand rises.  As the energy grid continues to evolve, TES provides unique opportunities to further enable widespread renewable energy deployment.

Biographical Sketch: Jason Hirschey is a postdoctoral researcher in the Thermal Energy Systems group at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado.  He received his PhD in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2022 on near ambient temperature thermal energy storage for building heating and cooling.  His current research focuses on thermal energy and heat transfer with special emphasis on concentrated solar power and high temperature thermal energy storage for power generation.

Two-player zero-sum differential games with one-sided information and state constraints, aka Football

Date: October 11, 2024; Time: 2:30 PM Location: PWEB 175

Abstract: Enabling embodied intelligence requires robots to plan according to unknown and potentially adversarial intents of interacting agents. This talk will focus on one scenario where theory and methods are underdeveloped. Specifically, we study zero-sum differential games with state constraints and one-sided information, where the informed player (Player 1) has a categorical payoff type unknown to the uninformed player (Player 2). The goal of Player 1 is to minimize his payoff without violating the constraints, while Player 2 either aims to violate the state constraints or, failing that, maximize the payoff. Examples of such games include man-to-man matchup in football and missile defense scenarios. Due to the zero-sum nature, Player 1 may need to delay information release or even manipulate Player 2’s belief to take full advantage of information asymmetry, while Player 2’s strategy will need to balance all possible consequences. Existing solvers such as CFR+ (e.g., for Poker) are applicable, but are not scalable to continuous action spaces as is often the case in robotics. We will discuss efficient solvers for these games by leveraging unique structural properties of their value functions.

Biographical Sketch: Dr. Yi Ren is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Arizona State University. His research spans a range of topics at the intersection of machine learning and engineering, with recent focuses on differential game theory, GenAI model attribution, and representation learning for materials. He has published in both machine learning conferences, including ICLR and ICML, and engineering journals, such as IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Acta Materialia. Dr. Ren received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2012 and his Bachelor’s degree in Automotive Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2007. Outside of research, he enjoys playing soccer and spending time with his children.

Abstract

I will first present a portable setup to generate shock waves using the exploding wire technique. Subsequently, I will showcase how droplets of various kinds (liquid metal, water, and polymeric liquids) interact and breakup in the shock wave and associated flow. I will also show the various instabilities that develop prior to breakup that are universal in nature. Lastly, I will showcase some results on shock-droplet flame interactions with analyses on flame extinction and droplet breakup.

Biographical Sketch

Prof. Saptarshi Basu received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from University of Connecticut in 2007 with Prof. B. M Cetegen before joining University of Central Florida as an Assistant Professor. In 2010, he relocated to India and joined the prestigious Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore where he is currently the Pratt and Whitney Chair Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Prof. Basu primarily works on multiphase systems, especially droplets at multiple length and timescales across multiple application domains ranging from surface patterning to combustion. Recently Prof. Basu have done extensive research on transmission of aerosols during COVID and on the efficacy of facemasks. His research marries fundamental aspects of classical fluid mechanics like vortex dynamics and swirling flows and the more interdisciplinary aspects of interfacial transport as in droplets to offer unprecedented insights into multiphase systems.

He is a fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering, ASME, Institute of Physics, Royal Aeronautical Society and Royal Society of Chemistry. Prof. Basu is the recipient of DST Swarnajayanti Fellowship (equivalent of PECASE) in Engineering. Prof. Basu is a co-founder of a Biotech startup specializing in AI based Point of Care Diagnostics and a technical advisor to a deep tech startup involved in micro gas turbines. Prof. Basu serves as an editor/guest editor of several journals like Nature-scientific reports, Experiments in Fluids and European Physical Journal Special Topics. Prof. Basu’s research is extensively funded by Department of Defence, Indian Space Research Organization, Department of Science and Technology, Indo-German Science and Technology Center, Indo-US Clean Energy Center, NSF and industries like Siemens and Tata Motors. Prof. Basu has guided more than 20 PhD students in his career and published over 200 journal articles including many in Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Physics of Fluids, Combustion & Flame, Langmuir, Proc. Roy. Soc. etc.

Abstract: Advances in electrical energy storage systems are critical for vehicle electrification, renewable energy integration into the electric grid, and electric aviation. Recent years have witnessed an urgent need to accelerate innovation toward realizing improved and safe utilization of high energy and power densities, for example, in lithium-ion and advanced battery chemistries. These are complex, dynamical systems that include coupled processes encompassing electronic, ionic, and solid-state diffusive transport, electrochemical reactions at electrode/electrolyte interfaces, mechanical stress generation, and thermal transport in porous electrodes. This presentation will highlight the importance of the underlying mechanistic interactions at scale in the design of novel paradigms in exemplar energy storage architectures.

Biographical Sketch: Partha P. Mukherjee is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and a University Faculty Scholar at Purdue University. His prior appointments include Assistant Professor and Morris E. Foster Faculty Fellow of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University (2012-2017), Staff Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (2009-2011), Director’s Research Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory (2008-2009), and Engineer at Fluent India (currently Ansys Inc., 1999-2003). He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University in 2007. His awards include Scialog Fellows’ recognition for advanced energy storage, University Faculty Scholar and Faculty Excellence for Early Career Research awards from Purdue University, The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society Young Leaders Award, and invited presentations at the U.S. National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering symposium and Gordon Research Conference – Batteries, to name a few. His research interests are focused on mesoscale physics and stochastics of transport, chemistry, and materials interactions, including an emphasis on the broad spectrum of energy storage and conversion.