Robert Owens
Vanderbilt University, United States

RESEARCH GOALS: Mr. Owens and the research team at Vanderbilt University are working to improve the efficiency of the engineering process per DARPA's Adaptive Vehicle Make project.

METHODS:

• Integrate modeling systems and mechanical design/analysis applications.
• Improve the mechanical design/analysis process.
• Improve the engineering process by a factor of 5x.

MSC RESEARCH ASSIST AWARD: Mr. Owens and Vanderbilt University were awarded MSC Nastran to increase the efficiency of structural, modal, fatigue, buckling and thermal analysis.

BIO: Mr. Owens holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Tennessee Technological University and an M.S. in Computer Science from the Florida Institute of Technology. He has seventeen years of experience as a Staff Engineer for Lockheed Martin, developing launch and control applications for the Space Shuttle.

Mr. Owens has also spent a number of years as a Mechanical Engineer, designing defense products and a Senior Principal Engineer at a commercial software company, developing applications for large call centers.

Mr. Owens is currently developing integrations between Cyber-Physical modeling systems and mechanical design/analysis applications to increase the effiency of the mechanical design/analysis process.

RESEARCH UPDATE:

April 2013

• Mr. Owens and his research team at Vanderbilt are focused on P solvers, solution accuracy and anomaly mitigation.
• Their interest in MSC Nastran's P solver centers on the ease of varying the polynomial order to achieve convergence.
• For solution accuracy, the team has been comparing closed form solutions with FEA solutions.
• They are also addressing how to mitigate singularities.

January 2013

• Mr. Owens and his research team at Vanderbilt are focusing on mesh quality, convergence, singularities and loading/constraint errors to assure first-order analysis quality.
• Once the programmatic approach has been narrowed down to a few potential designs, they will move to a higher fidelity analysis.

October 2012

• Mr. Owens and his research team are using their tool suite to drive analysis over large sets of potential designs.
• They have integrated MSC Nastran with their tool suite to programmatically generate MSC Nastran decks and invoke the MSC Nastran solver for static structural analyses.
• They are completing the integration to programmatically post process the result to compute metrics such as factor-of-safety.