DMLS Wind Tunnel Models

Additive manufacturing, sometimes called direct digital fabrication or rapid prototyping, has been in the news quite a bit lately. I wrote a post recently for Dayton Diode about the many additive manufacturing options available for fabricating functional parts or tooling in response to comments on a piece in the Economist, and commented recently on Armed and Dangerous in a discussion about 3D printed handguns. There are just so many exciting processes and materials available for direct digital parts production today. Some of the work I've been doing recently to qualify one particular additive process for fabricating high-speed wind-tunnel models (abstract) was accepted for presentation at next year's Aerospace Sciences Meeting.

We used Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) to fabricate some proof-of-concept models in 17-4 stainless steel. DMLS is a trade name for the selective laser melting process developed by EOS. The neat thing about DMLS (and additive processes in general) is that complicated internal features like pressure tap lines can be printed in a single-piece model. Being able to reduce the parts count on a model to one while incorporating 20 or so instrumentation lines (limited only by the base area of our particular model) is really great, because one part is much faster and less expensive to design and fabricate than a multi-component model with complicated internal plumbing. The folks down at AEDC are also exploring the use of DMLS to fabricate tunnel force and moment balances for much the same reason we like it for models and others like it for injection mold tooling: intricate internal passages, in their case, for instrumentation cooling and wiring.

FreeCAD on Fedora

UpAerospace 10 inch Payload Can (PTS10)

There seems to be a great deal of difficulty (brlcad, opencascade) in getting any of the open source CAD programs incorporated into the Linux distributions that maintain high standards on acceptable license terms and packaging guidelines (Fedora). Luckily, for a pragmatic guy like me I can now install FreeCAD from the RPMFusion non-free repos.

yum install freecad

I'm excited to see if I can get better Boolean operation results (less manual mesh fixing) with FreeCAD for 3D printing than I've had with Blender.

2011 AIAA Day-Cin AiS Entries

Stripes

Neither of these pictures won the competition, but the AIAA folks give you a nice print of your picture at the end so it's very worthwhile to enter their Art-in-Science competition.

Breakdown

Human Powered Helicopter Flight Testing

Flight test is a tough business. Even more so when every second airborne requires near max physical exertion!

I hope these students get their structure fixed and get back in the air soon. This is some really great work. Their vehicle only weighs 71 lbs.

Check out their record setting human-powered helicopter endurance flight.

RIP John Hunter

Fernando Perez fperez.net@gmail.com via scipy.org
10:59 PM (18 hours ago) to SciPy, SciPy, numfocus

Dear friends and colleagues,

I am terribly saddened to report that yesterday, August 28 2012 at 10am, John D. Hunter died from complications arising from cancer treatment at the University of Chicago hospital, after a brief but intense battle with this terrible illness. John is survived by his wife Miriam, his three daughters Rahel, Ava and Clara, his sisters Layne and Mary, and his mother Sarah.

Note: If you decide not to read any further (I know this is a long message), please go to this page for some important information about how you can thank John for everything he gave in a decade of generous contributions to the Python and scientific communities: http://numfocus.org/johnhunter.

Experimental Design Criteria

I used the AlgDesign package in R to generate some optimal designs for a 6th order 2D response surface. There is still clustering near the boundaries (as shown in this post) with the I optimal design, but there are a few more points "in the middle" of the parameter space.

Interactive Curiosity Rover Panorama

Curiosity rover: Martian solar day 2 in New Mexico Interactive Panorama

Validating the Prediction of Unobserved Quantities

I was going to just post a bit of the abstract and a link to this recent tech report as a comment on my V&V workshop notes, but Validating the Prediction of Unobserved Quantities was interesting enough to deserve its own post. The basic approach is well-founded in probability theory, and there are some novel concepts as well.

Here's the abstract:

In predictive science, computational models are used to make predictions regarding the response of complex systems. Generally, there is no observational data for the predicted quantities (the quantities of interest or QoIs) prior to the computation, since otherwise predictions would not be necessary. Further, to maximize the utility of the predictions it is necessary to assess their reliability|i.e., to provide a quantitative characterization of the discrepancies between the prediction and the real world. Two aspects of this reliability assessment are judging the credibility of the prediction process and characterizing the uncertainty in the predicted quantities. These processes are commonly referred to as validation and uncertainty quantification (VUQ), and they are intimately linked. In typical VUQ approaches, model outputs for observed quantities are compared to experimental observations to test for consistency. While this consistency is necessary, it is not sufficient for extrapolative predictions because, by itself, it only ensures that the model can predict the observed quantities in the observed scenarios. Indeed, the fundamental challenge of predictive science is to make credible predictions with quantified uncertainties, despite the fact that the predictions are extrapolative. At the PECOS Center, a broadly applicable approach to VUQ for prediction of unobserved quantities has evolved. The approach incorporates stochastic modeling, calibration, validation, and predictive assessment phases where uncertainty representations are built, informed, and tested. This process is the subject of the current report, as well as several research issues that need to be addressed to make it applicable in practical problems.

Mixed Effects for Fusion

It seems like the folks at Prometheus Fusion Perfection have matured their equipment and operations to the point of being able to run on a fairly repeatable basis. Right now they are working on a Symmetry test of their polywell. I posted a link to an example design/analysis using R that would allow a basic response surface for the device to be estimated (script embedded below the fold). It uses AlgDesign for the blocking by shot, and lme4 to fit a model that includes a random effect to account for shot-to-shot variation.