CAREER: Immersed Boundary Methods in Computational Solid Mechanics

本学院早期职业发展（Career）提案涉及创建一种新型计算固体力学工具，该工具基于在任意网格中嵌入固体几何，称为浸入边界法。从结构部件的描述到数值模型的过渡往往是阻碍分析成为设计周期不可分割部分的瓶颈。该方案的第一个成果是一套全面的工具，它简化了从包含结构部件（如固体和外壳）的几何描述到其机械性能分析的路径。第二个贡献来自于这些工具的应用，用于研究由加压流体驱动的裂纹的动态力学行为。这项工作的成果为卫生、工业和国土安全应用中常见的问题提供了解决办法，并将明确努力将新工具转让给科学、国防或工业领域的有关各方。流体驱动裂缝引起了能源和采矿业的兴趣，因为它们对油气储层管理和碳封存（一种改善全球变暖的有前途的技术）具有重要意义。提出了一项综合教育计划，其核心思想是在中学培养科学兴趣，预计将影响3万名儿童。该计划围绕着通过暑期学校培训中学教师，让他们了解纳米技术和计算等令人兴奋的方面，并与校友合作，形成一个hands？为学生讲课。

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) proposal is concerned with the creation of a new breed of computational solid mechanics tools based on embedding the solid geometry in arbitrary meshes, known as immersed boundary methods. The transition from the description of a structural component to a numerical model is more-often-than-not the bottleneck that hinders analysis from becoming an integral part of the design cycle. The first outcome of this proposal is a comprehensive set of tools that streamlines the path from a geometric description containing structural components such as solids and shells to the analysis of its mechanical performance. The second contribution emanates from an application of these tools to study the dynamic mechanical behavior of cracks driven by a pressurized fluid.The outcome of this work provides solutions to problems common to health, industrial and homeland security applications, and an explicit effort will be made to transfer the new tools to interested parties in the scientific, defense or industrial areas. Fluid-driven cracks are of interest to the energy and mining industries for their implications on oil and gas reservoir management, and in carbon sequestration, a promising technique to ameliorate global warming. A comprehensive educational plan is proposed, whose central idea is to foster science interest at middle school, with an estimated impact of 30,000 children. The plan revolves around training middle school teachers in exciting aspects of nanotechnology and computation through a summer school, and in collaborating with its alumni to shape the content of a program of hands?on lectures for the students.