Preliminary Announcement: A Short Course on

Uncertainty Management and Quantification in Industrial Analysis and Design

September 15-16, 2011

Crowne-Plaza Hampton Marina

Hampton, Virginia

Call for contributions to the open forum
Discount room reservation extended to Aug. 31
NASA Block registration has been filled

Course: NIA is proud to present this ERCOFTAC organized course to the US uncertainty quantification community. A  previous version of the course was presented in Munich, Germany on March 3-4, 2011. The course has been organized by Dr. Charles Hirsch. The US delivery is coordinated by Dr. Bernard Grossman of NIA.

                 

Venue: The course will be at the Crowne-Plaza Hotel at the Hampton Marina in Hampton Virginia. A block of rooms has been reserved at the discounted conference rate $77 plus tax per night. The rooms will be held until August 31, 2011. Rooms may be reserved by calling toll-free 1-888-233-9527 and asking for the group block “NIA”, or by accessing the booking link: Room Reservation – UQ Course

Registration: The course fee will be $1150. The fee includes course registration, course material, lunches, refreshment and the course dinner held at the Virginia Air and Space Center. Please note that accommodations are not included in the course fee.  
 
In addition, NASA Langley has reserved a block of seats for the course: contact Joseph Morrison, in the Computational AeroSciences Branch for further details. At this time, the NASA block registration has been filled. If you have not already registered and wish to attend, you may do so, but are subject to the course registration fee. NASA civil servants who were not part of the block registration should submit a standard external training request (Form 182) in SATERN for approval.

Click here to register for the class.

We request that all attendees use the above link to register, including those who are participating via the block registration as well as those individually registering. Additionally, we request that all instructors for the class also register in order to have correct badging information.

Background: Uncertainty quantification is a new paradigm in industrial analysis and design as it aims at taking into account the presence of numerous uncertainties affecting the behavior of physical systems. Dominating uncertainties can be either be operational (such as boundary conditions) and/or geometrical resulting from unknown properties, such as tip clearances of rotating compressor blades or from manufacturing tolerances.

Whether bringing a new product from conception into production or operating complex plant and production processes, commercial success rests on careful management and control of risk in the face of many interacting uncertainties. For example a new aircraft or aero-engine must be designed and engineered within a given time frame and budget to meet a given set of performance requirements, and then manufactured at unit cost and rates that meet an overall business plan. Today’s fiercely competitive market and increasingly stringent regulatory environment is such that there is very little margin of error. Failure to appreciate, understand and appropriately manage risks inevitably results in severe financial penalties, and even irrevocable damage to reputation.

Historically, chief engineers and project managers have estimated and managed risk using mostly human judgment founded upon years of experience and heritage. As the 21st century begins to unfold, the design and engineering of products as well as the control of plant and process are increasingly relying on computer models and simulation. This era of virtual design and engineering opens the opportunity to deal with uncertainty in a systematic formal way by which sensitivities to various uncertainties can be quantified and understood, and designs and processes optimized so as to be robust against such uncertainties. Human judgment will always play an important role, but leading companies in many fields of engineering are increasingly aware of these possibilities and uncertainty quantification is beginning to feature strongly in their strategic aspirations. Thus this is a very opportune moment to introduce a two- day awareness course on this emerging topic. The aim is to share the aspirations and requirements of leading companies in the fields of aerospace, energy, transport and chemical process; review emerging methods and techniques and how these are being deployed; and define the current state-of-the-art and map out-near term future possibilities.

Uncertainty quantification has become a critical feature of a computational methodologies which will be utilized within an engineering design process. There has been considerable progress in this field at both the national and international level. The purpose of this two-day short course is to bring some the most promising approaches and developments in this field to the attention of researchers and engineers from academia, industry and research laboratories.

A recent development has been a short course arranged by Dr. Charles Hirsch of Belgium, who has organized an ERCOFTAC short course, entitled “Uncertaintly Management and Quantification in Industrial Analysis and Design” which was delivered in Munich, Germany on March 3-4, 2011. ERCOFTAC is a European-based association of research, education and industry groups in the technology of flow, turbulence and combustion. The name stands for European Research Community on Flow, Combustion and Turbulence. Dr. Hirsch is the President of NUMECA International, a CFD software firm. He is also a Professor Emeritus of the Faculty of Applied Sciences of Vrije Universiteit Brussel and is an internationally-known expert in CFD.

Speakers:

         ·      Prof. Charles Hirsch, Numeca International, Belgium
·      Prof. Anthony Hutton, Chairman, ERCOFTAC, UK
·      Dr. Alberto Pasanisi, EDF, France
·      Dr. Bernhard Eisfeld, DLR, Germany
·      Dr. Jacques Peter, ONERA, France
·      Dr. Gilbert Roge, Dassault-Aviation, France
·      Dr. Allain Dervieux, INRIA, France
·      Dr. Thomas Zang, NASA Langley Research Center, USA
·      Dr. Andrew Booker, The Boeing Company, USA
·      Dr. Karl Alexander, Rolls Royce, USA

Agenda:

Contact:

If you have any questions about the short course, please contact Lisa Burke at (757) 325-6731.

Open Forum: On the last afternoon of the conference there will be an open forum, where participants can share their experience in uncertainty quantification and management with all the speakers and other participants. We request that presentations be limited to 10 minutes. To reserve a slot in the open forum, please contact Bernard Grossman