Tag Archives: MOTIVATE

Fake facts & untrustworthy predictions

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I need to confess to writing a misleading post some months ago entitled ‘In Einstein’s footprints?‘ on February 27th 2019, in which I promoted our 4th workshop on the ‘Validation of Computational Mechanics Models‘ that we held last month at Guild Hall of Carpenters [Zunfthaus zur Zimmerleuten] in Zurich.  I implied that speakers at the workshop would be stepping in Einstein’s footprints when they presented their research at the workshop, because Einstein presented a paper at the same venue in 1910.  However, as our host in Zurich revealed in his introductory remarks , the Guild Hall was gutted by fire in 2007 and so we were meeting in a fake, or replica, which was so good that most of us had not realised.  This was quite appropriate because a theme of the workshop was enhancing the credibility of computer models that are used to replicate the real-world.  We discussed the issues surrounding the trustworthiness of models in a wide range of fields including aerospace engineering, biomechanics, nuclear power and toxicology.  Many of the presentations are available on the website of the EU project MOTIVATE which organised and sponsored the workshop as part of its dissemination programme.  While we did not solve any problems, we did broaden people’s understanding of the issues associated with trustworthiness of predictions and identified the need to develop common approaches to support regulatory decisions across a range of industrial sectors – that’s probably the theme for our 5th workshop!

The MOTIVATE project has received funding from the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 754660 and the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation under contract number 17.00064.

The opinions expressed in this blog post reflect only the author’s view and the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

Image: https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/Zunfthaus-Zur-Zimmerleuten-Wiederaufbauprojekt-steht/story/30815219

 

Same problems in a different language

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I spent a lot of time on trains last week.  I left Liverpool on Tuesday evening for Bristol and spent Wednesday at Airbus in Filton discussing the implementation of the technologies being developed in the EU Clean Sky 2 projects MOTIVATE and DIMES.  On Wednesday evening I travelled to Bracknell and on Thursday gave a seminar at Syngenta on model credibility in predictive toxicology before heading home to Liverpool.  But, on Friday I was on the train again, to Manchester this time, to listen to a group of my PhD students presenting their projects to their peers in our new Centre for Doctoral Training called Growing skills for Reliable Economic Energy from Nuclear, or GREEN.  The common thread, besides the train journeys, is the Fidelity And Credibility of Testing and Simulation (FACTS).  My research group is working on how we demonstrate the fidelity of predictions from models, how we establish trust in both predictions from computational models and measurements from experiments that are often also ‘models’ of the real world.  The issues are similar whether we are considering the structural performance of aircraft [as on Wednesday], the impact of agro-chemicals [as on Thursday], or the performance of fusion energy and the impact of a geological disposal site [as on Friday] (see ‘Hierarchical modelling in engineering and biology‘ on March 14th, 2018) .  The scientific and technical communities associated with each application talk a different language, in the sense that they use different technical jargon and acronyms; and they are surprised and interested to discover that similar problems are being tackled by communities that they rarely think about or encounter.

Massive engineering

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Last month I was at the Photomechanics 2018 conference in Toulouse in France.  Photomechanics is the science of using photons to measure deformation and displacements in anything, from biological cells to whole engineering structures, such as bridges or powerstations [see for example: ‘Counting photons to measure stress‘ posted on November 18th, 2015].  I am interested in the challenges created by the extremes of scale and environmental conditions; although on this occasion we presented our research on addressing the challenges of industrial applications, in the EU projects INSTRUCTIVE [see ‘Instructive update‘ on October 4th, 2017] and MOTIVATE [see ‘Brave New World‘ posted on January 10th, 2018].

It was a small conference without parallel sessions and the organisers were more imaginative than usual in providing us with opportunities for interaction.  At the end of first day of talks, we went on a guided walking tour of old Toulouse.  At the end of second day, we went to the Toulouse Aerospace Museum and had the chance to go onboard Concorde.

I stayed an extra day for an organised tour of the Airbus A380 assembly line.  Only the engine pylons are made in Toulouse.  The rest of the 575-seater plane is manufactured around Europe and arrives in monthly road convoys after travelling by sea to local ports.  The cockpit, centre, tail sections of the double-deck fuselage travel separately on specially-made trucks with each 45m long wing section following on its own transporter.  It takes about a month to assemble these massive sections.  This is engineering on a huge scale performed with laser precision (laser systems are used to align the sections).  The engines are also manufactured elsewhere and transported to Toulouse to be hung on the wings.  The maximum diameter of the Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engines, being attached to the plane we saw, is approximately same as the fuselage diameter of an A320 airplane.

Once the A380 is assembled and its systems tested, then it is flown to another Airbus factory in Germany to be painted and for the cabin to be fitted out to the customer’s specification.  In total, 11 Airbus factories in France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom are involved in producing the A380; this does not include the extensive supply chain supporting these factories.  As I toured the assembly line and our guide assailed us with facts and figures about the scale of the operation, I was thinking about why the nuclear power industry across Europe could not collaborate on this scale to produce affordable, identical power stations.  Airbus originated from a political decision in the 1970s to create a globally-competitive European aerospace industry that led to a collaboration between national manufacturers which evolved into the Airbus company.  One vision for fusion energy is a globally dispersed manufacturing venture that would evolve from the consortium that is currently building the ITER experiment and planning the DEMO plant.  However, there does not appear to be any hint that the nuclear fission industry is likely to follow the example of the European aerospace industry to create a globally-competitive industry producing massive pieces of engineering within a strictly regulated environment.

There was no photography allowed at Airbus so today’s photograph is of Basilique Notre-Dame de la Daurade in Toulouse.

Brave New World

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERATerm has started, and our students are preparing for end-of-semester examinations; so, I suspect that they would welcome the opportunity to deploy the sleeping-learning that Aldous Huxley envisaged in his ‘Brave New World’ of 2540.  In the brave new world of digital engineering, some engineers are attempting to conceive of a world in which experiments have become obsolete because we can rely on computational modelling to simulate engineering systems.  This ambitious goal is a driver for the MOTIVATE project [see my post entitled ‘Getting smarter‘ on June 21st, 2017]; an EU-project that kicked-off about six months ago and was the subject of a brainstorming session in the Red Deer in Sheffield last September [see my post entitled ‘Anything other than lager, stout or porter!‘ on September 6th, 2017.  The project has its own website now at www.engineeringvalidation.org

A world without experiments is almost unimaginable for engineers whose education and training is deeply rooted in empiricism, which is the philosophical approach that requires assumptions, models and theories to be tested against observations from the real-world before they can be accepted.  In the MOTIVATE project, we are thinking about ways in which fewer experiments can provide more and better measured data for the validation of computational models of engineering systems.   In December, under the auspices of the project, experts from academia, industry and national labs from across Europe met near Bristol and debated how to reshape the traditional flow-chart used in the validation of engineering models, which places equal weight on experiments and computational models [see ASME V&V 10-2006 Figure 2].  In a smaller follow-up meeting in Zurich, just before Christmas [see my post ‘A reflection of existentialism‘ on December 20th, 2017], we blended the ideas from the Bristol session into a new flow-chart that could lead to the validation of some engineering systems without conducting experiments in parallel.  This is not perhaps as radical as it sounds because this happens already for some evolutionary designs, especially if they are not safety-critical.  Nevertheless, if we are to achieve the paradigm shift towards the new digital world, then we will have to convince the wider engineering community about our novel approach through demonstrations of its successful application, which sounds like empiricism again!  More on that in future updates.

Image by Erwin Hack: Coffee and pastries awaiting technical experts debating behind the closed door.