Ozer finds value in participating on an IMA student team
Ozkan Ozer was one of six participants chosen to participate on the popular (most participants' first choice) Boeing workshop, Modeling aircraft hoses and flexible conduits, at the IMA workshop, Mathematical Modeling in Industry XV held in early August..
Each of the 30 registered students worked in teams of up to 6 students under the guidance of a mentor from industry, who helped guide them in the modeling process, analysis and computational work associated with a real-world industrial problem. Each team filed a progress report midway, made an oral final presentation and submitted a written report at the end of the 10-day period (links provided below).
Thomas Grandine from Boeing mentored Ozer and his teammates:
Ke Han (Penn State), Huiyi Hu (UCLA), Eunkyung Ko (Missisipi State), Cory Simon (UBC), Changhui Tan (U of Maryland), who worked together to prepare the following abstract: "Modern commercial airplanes are assembled out of millions of different parts. While many of these parts are rigid, many of them are not. For example, the hydraulic lines and flexible electrical conduits that supply an airplane's landing gear change their shape as the landing gear goes through its motion (you can see some of these lines in the accompanying photograph). These shapes can be modeled by minimizing the potential energy of the rest state of one of these flexible lines as the ends of the lines are moved by the landing gear. While this problem is amenable to solution through direct optimization of individual finite elements, the method often proves to be slow and unreliable. In this investigation, we will explore the use of variational methods (i.e. the calculus of variations) in an attempt to discover a more elegant and robust approach to modeling these flexible airplane parts."
Ozer, who was chosen by his team to give the final presentation, felt the opportunity to work with Boeing was of great value. "It gave me a chance to work on a "real world" problem," he said. "Our mentor was super helpful and we experienced more progress in ten days than was expected in the beginning, even fixing a code that had been used by Boeing engineers for twenty years."
The main problem, Ozer explained, was that the code was providing undesirable and physically not meaningful solutions for some special cases. "We were able to eliminate these solutions to get a meaningful solution (a local minimum) of the minimization problem," said Ozer. "We also provided a second order sufficient condition by using Sobolev inequalities to ensure that our solution is indeed a local minimum."
Ozer recommends all applied mathematics PhD students - especially those willing to work in industry - attend the IMA workshop before graduating.