SCS: Daniele Panozzo (NYU). TBA.

Thursday Apr 13, 2023, 10:00 AM → 11:00 AM America/New_York

3rd Floor Classroom/3-Flatiron Institute (162 5th Avenue)

 

Presenter: Daniele Panozzo (NYU)

 

Title: Robust Geometry Processing for Physical Simulation

 

Abstract: The numerical solution of partial differential equations
(PDE) is ubiquitously used for physical simulation in scientific
computing, computer graphics, and engineering. Ideally, a PDE solver
should be opaque: the user provides as input the domain boundary,
boundary conditions, and the governing equations, and the code returns
an evaluator that can compute the value of the solution at any point
of the input domain. This is surprisingly far from being the case for
all existing open-source or commercial software, despite the research
efforts in this direction and the large academic and industrial
interest. To a large extent, this is due to lack of robustness and
generality in the geometry processing algorithms used to convert raw
geometrical data into a format suitable for a PDE solver.

I will discuss the limitations of the current state of the art, and
present a proposal for an integrated pipeline, considering data
acquisition, meshing, basis design, and numerical optimization as a
single challenge, where tradeoffs can be made between different phases
to increase automation and efficiency. I will demonstrate that this
integrated approach offers many advantages, while opening exciting new
geometry processing challenges, and that a fully opaque meshing and
analysis solution is already possible for heat transfer and elasticity
problems with contact. I will present a set of applications enabled by
this approach in force measurements in biology, shape design in
mechanical engineering, stress estimation in biomechanics, and
simulation of deformable objects in graphics.