MMAE Seminar - Dr. John Hwang - Multidisciplinary Design Optimization of Next-generation Aerospace Systems

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John T. Rettaliata Engineering Center, Room 104, 10 West 32nd Street, Chicago, IL 60616
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Armour College of Engineering's Mechanical, Materials & Aerospace Engineering Department will welcome Dr. John Hwang, a research engineer at NASA Glenn Research Center, to present his lecture, Multidisciplinary Design Optimization of Next-generation Aerospace Systems.

Abstract

In commercial aviation, there is a large amount of interest in unconventional configurations for commercial airliners and electric concepts for urban air taxi operation. With the novelty of these concepts, computational design methods are poised to play a large role in exploring and refining potential designs. In particular, multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) can aid the designer by providing the ability to algorithmically compute the optimal design for a specified objective, set of constraints, and design parametrization. This talk describes recent advancements that enable large-scale MDO methods to optimize thousands of design variables at the cost of running the model only hundreds of times. We focus on methods for efficient derivative computation of complex, multidisciplinary models as this is critical for avoiding the curse of dimensionality in optimization problems. The practical use of large-scale MDO is demonstrated by highlighting applications in satellite and commercial aircraft design, as well as an optimization study for NASA’s new electric X-plane, which is a demonstrator for some of the technologies planned for future urban air taxi concepts.

Biography

Dr. John Hwang is a research engineer at NASA Glenn Research Center, where he has been since July, 2016. Prior to this, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan. He received his PhD in Aerospace Engineering in 2015, MS in Mathematics in 2013, and MSE in Aerospace Engineering in 2012, all from the University of Michigan, and his BASc in Engineering Science in 2010 from the University of Toronto. Dr. Hwang's primary research area is multidisciplinary design optimization, which he applies to the design of aerospace systems. His specific areas of interest include adjoint methods, high-performance computing, geometry modeling and meshing, composite materials, optimal control, and surrogate modeling.