Bio: Bo Zhu is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral associate at MIT CSAIL. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2015. His research interests encompass computer graphics, computational physics, and computational fabrication. In particular, he focuses on building computational approaches to automate the process of exploring complex physical systems.

Super-Resolution Structural Simulation and Optimization

Complex physical systems exhibiting mixed-dimensional geometry and multi-scale mechanics are ubiquitous. Examples include biological structures, such as insect wing exoskeletons, fluid phenomena, such as bubbles and jets, and human-made objects, such as microrobots. The beauty and complexity of these systems attract efforts from scientists, engineers, and artists in various fields. However, a computational investigation of these systems on the level of super-resolution  –with millions to billions of computational elements — is still challenging, due to the non-manifold geometric structures, non-linear governing physics, and the tight coupling between them.

My work tackles these challenges by rethinking of the computation pipeline—from a perspective that aims to blur the line between discrete geometry and continuous physics. My guiding principle is to study the hidden low-dimensional topological and structural characteristics underpinning these complex systems and to create the most natural geometric analogs in a discrete setting for efficient simulation and optimization. In this talk, I will present two examples to demonstrate this methodology, including a super-resolution topology optimization algorithm based on sparse grids to emerge biomimetic structures and a numerical simulation approach based on simplicial complexes to model codimensional fluids. These computational tools enable the investigation, discovery, and development of a broad range of complex physical systems that are multi-scale and mixed-dimensional, with applications in computer graphics, computational physics, and additive manufacturing.

Prof. Zhu is being hosted by Prof. Saitou (ME).  If you would like to meet with him during his visit, please send an email to [email protected]. If you are an MICDE graduate student and would like to join Prof. Zhu for lunch please RSVP by Friday, December 6th .