PI:  Judy Vance
Co-PIs:  Eliot Winer

Summary: Traditionally, the product design process involves designing a shape, selecting materials, performing analysis, building prototypes, and testing. To achieve a suitable design, numerous iterations are performed at several steps in the process. But these iterations can be time consuming and limit the number of design possibilities. This project seeks to develop methods to speed up the design process by allowing designers to rapidly explore large shape and/or material property changes.

The proposed research is based on a project currently in development at VRAC. Referred to as the Virtual Reality Meshless 3-D solver, VrM3D uses meshless methods to perform 3D stress analyses of solid models. By defining a bounding volume around portions of the model and computing stress sensitivities, a designer uses free form deformation to alter the shape and observe stress changes in the product while in the virtual environment. At any point, a reanalysis may be performed to improve the solution and compute new stress sensitivities for approximating additional stresses.