Billion-Degree of Freedom Computational Dynamics: From Granular Flows to 3D Printing and on to River Fording Simulation

AbstractThis talk will focus on how a Lagrangian perspective on dynamics is used to capture the time evolution of complex systems, e.g., granular flows, fluid-solid interaction problems, etc. In this context, the aspects that turn out to be more challenging are tied to the handling of friction, contact, geometry, large deformations and numerical solution scaling. The talk will highlight modeling and numerical solution techniques developed to address several of these challenges. Our solution methodology contributions have been implemented in an open-source simulation platform called Chrono, which is available on GitHub and used by hundreds of individuals to analyze large multi-physics dynamics problems. The talk will touch on several applications tied to granular dynamics, 3D printing and additive manufacturing, robotics, and ground vehicle mobility.

BioDan Negrut received his Mechanical Engineering Ph.D. in 1998 from the University of Iowa under the supervision of Professor Edward J. Haug. He spent six years working for Mechanical Dynamics, Inc., a software company in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 2004 he served as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He spent 2005 as a Visiting Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division. At the end of 2005 Dan joined the Mechanical Engineering faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His interests are in Computational Science and he leads the Simulation-Based Engineering Lab (http://sbel.wisc.edu). Lab sponsors include US Army TARDEC, US Army ERDC, Army Research Office, and National Science Foundation. The lab's projects focus on high performance computing, computational dynamics, terramechanics, robotics, and fluid-solid interaction problems. Dr. Negrut received in 2009 a National Science Foundation Career Award. Since 2010 he is an NVIDIA CUDA Fellow. He is one of the technical leads of Project Chrono, an open source physics-based simulation engine (http://www.projectchrono.org/).