Sunday, 29 December 2013

Topology optimization of saturated flows

In 2013 I spent most of my time for a topology optimization project for Procter & Gamble. Technically it we perform transient multi-material optimization for the nonlinear Richards equation which models unsaturated flow. The product behind is a Pampers diaper. The first phase of the project is successfully finished. It was quite hard and computationally and numerically the most complicated and expensive problem I had to deal with up to now.

During summer slump when there is nothing else to report in the local newspaper, we even had two interviews. Well, I doubt this is the career boost a colleague sees in it - and the article is really written for the broad public by non-technicals journalists.

Sorry, all in German.

14. August 2013, Nuerberger Zeitung
Das High-Tech-Produkt für den trockenen Babypopo

15. August 2013, Nordbayrische Nachrichten
Gutes für den Baby-Po: Erlanger Forscher suchen nach der Super-Windel

Here the announcement of the Cluster of Excellence Advanced Materials
http://blogs.fau.de/news/2013/07/30/gutes-fur-den-baby-popo/


Friday, 4 October 2013

Talk on Local Optimal Polarization

I'm just back from the piezo-workshop 2013, correctly, the 9th Int. Workshop on Direct and Inverse Problems in Piezoelectricity in Weimar, organized by Prof. Tom Lahmer, a former colleague.

On the workshop 2012 and at WCSMO-10 I presented piezoelectric Free Material Optimization (FMO), however, this makes not that much sense for piezoelectricity, as weak material is the generally best and the optimum is just controlled by the lower bound. For elasticity, where stiff material is in general good, this is a complete different story.

Doing orientational optimization, which has the physical interpretation of local polarization, the problem makes much sense and indeed has potential.



Two further examples I want to solve are dynamic problems (can the resonance frequency be moved by polarization, I guess so but it might be a small effect) and a solid auxetic (negative Poisson's ratio) device, what would be really impressing if this is possible.

Wednesday, 29 May 2013

WCSMO-10 is over

WCSMO-10 is over, and again I realized, that the WCSMO is by far the most interesting conference for me. The whole numerical topology optmization community was there and I enjoyed it very much. I have the impression that I meanwhile know a lot of the important people (at least a little :)).


I held a talk on piezoelectric free material optimization, similar to what I talked about on the last Workshop on Direct and Inverse Problems in Piezoelectricity, but this time not starting with the music of Jean Michel Jarre :)

People liked our tensor stiffness visualization, maybe I should put the Python code online ...

I also had a poster at the poster session about self-penalization. The content is from a former talk and can be also found in my thesis. My impression is, that private and direct communication/ discussion is best for the topic. The poster can also be downloaded.




This time Jamie Guest was almost omnipresent with a very large group. He appeared on 13 talks as (co-)author compared to 8 talks (co-)authored by Ole Sigmund. Well, numbers are one thing but it's impressive.

My favorite talk was by Alexander Verbart from the group of Fred van Keulen; A new approach for stress-based topology optimization: internal stress penalization. I did a little on stress optimization (e.g. piezoelectric stress optimization) but for me there are two open problems: have not grayness to confirm to the constraints and the miracle of the min vol problem which would be best for rho = rho_min. The idea of Alexander has neither stress penalization nor globalization parameters, subregions or anything else. The approach would allow gray material to confirm with the stresses but with some luck the optimizer won't find this solution. I'll have to give it a try.