Bio: Yongjie Jessica Zhang is a Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University with a courtesy appointment in Biomedical Engineering. She received her B.Eng. in Automotive Engineering, and M.Eng. in Engineering Mechanics from Tsinghua University, China; and M.Eng. in Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics and Ph.D. in Computational Engineering and Sciences from Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES), The University of Texas at Austin. After staying two years at ICES as a postdoctoral fellow, she joined CMU in 2007 as an assistant professor, and then was promoted to an associate professor in 2012 and a full professor in 2016. Her research interests include computational geometry, mesh generation, computer graphics, visualization, finite element method, isogeometric analysis and their application in computational biomedicine, material sciences and engineering. She has co-authored over 140 publications in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, and received the Autodesk Best Paper Award 1st Place in SIAM Conference on Solid and Physical Modeling 2015, the Best Paper Award in CompIMAGE’16 conference and one of the 5 Most Highly Cited Papers Published in Computer-Aided Design during 2014-2016. She recently published a book entitled “Geometric Modeling and Mesh Generation from Scanned Images” with CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group. She is the recipient of Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, NSF CAREER Award, Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, USACM Gallagher Young Investigator Award, Clarence H. Adamson Career Faculty Fellow in Mechanical Engineering, George Tallman Ladd Research Award, and Donald L. & Rhonda Struminger Faculty Fellow.

Image-Based Mesh Generation and Volumetric T-Spline Modeling for Isogeometric Analysis with Engineering Applications

With finite element method and scanning technology seeing increased use in many research areas, there is an emerging need for high-fidelity geometric modeling and mesh generation of spatially realistic domains. This talk will highlight research in three areas: image-based mesh generation for complicated domains, trivariate spline modeling for isogeometric analysis, as well as biomedical, material sciences and engineering applications. First Prof. Zhang will present advances and challenges in image-based geometric modeling and meshing along with a comprehensive computational framework, which integrates image processing, geometric modeling, mesh generation and quality improvement with multi-scale analysis at molecular, cellular, tissue and organ scales. Different from other existing methods, the presented framework supports five unique features: high-fidelity meshing for heterogeneous domains with topology ambiguity resolved; multiscale geometric modeling for biomolecular complexes; automatic all-hexahedral mesh generation with sharp feature preservation; robust quality improvement for non-manifold meshes; and guaranteed-quality meshing. These unique capabilities enable accurate, stable, and efficient mechanics calculation for many biomedicine, materials science and engineering applications. As a new advancement of traditional finite element method, isogeometric analysis (IGA) was proposed to integrate design and analysis. In the second part of this talk, she will present her latest research on volumetric T-spline parameterization for IGA applications. For arbitrary-topology objects, we first build a polycube whose topology is equivalent to the input geometry and it serves as the parametric domain for the following trivariate T-spline construction. Boolean operations, geometry skeleton and centroidal Voronoi tessellation based surface segmentation are used to preserve surface features. A parametric mapping is then used to build a one-to-one correspondence between the input geometry and the polycube boundary. After that, we choose the deformed octree subdivision of the polycube as the initial T-mesh, and make it valid through pillowing, quality improvement, and applying templates or truncated subdivision schemes to handle extraordinary nodes. Weighted and truncated T-spline basis functions are derived to enable analysis-suitability, including partition of unity and linear independence. The developed pipelines have been incorporated into commercial software such as Rhino and Abaqus.

Prof. Zhang is being hosted by Prof. Garikipati (Mechanical Engineering)