CGU-Boeing Partnership in Geometric Modeling for Industrial Applications

Claremont Graduate University, Claremont CA

Investigators

Abstract

This NSF-sponsored project enables a partnership between the School of Mathematical Sciences at Claremont Graduate University and The Boeing Company's Mathematics and Computing Technologies division to train a select group of applied mathematicians who can develop and apply novel geometric modeling methods to industrial problems of interest in manufacturing, aerospace, product design, medical imaging, robotics and related engineering industries. This will be accomplished within the framework of CGU's highly regarded Engineering and Industrial Applied Mathematics Clinic in which more than 170 year-long projects have been completed for industrial sponsors since the mid 1970s. In each of the five years of the project, a team of three graduate students will be recruited to spend a full academic year on a real-world geometric modeling problem that will be suggested by the industrial partner, Boeing. The project will be introduced by the industrial liaison at the beginning of the year. The students, together with a local advisor from one of the math departments at the Claremont Colleges, will work on the problem as a team, communicating with the industrial liaison on a regular basis. Significant milestones will include an interim progress report and presentation at the end of the first semester, and a complete written report (roughly similar in scope to a master's thesis) as well as an oral presentation at both Boeing and at CGU's Clinic Presentation Day, at the end of the academic year. Anticipated projects include: investigating methods for calculating self-intersections of surfaces; geometric model feature suppression using a surface offsetting and inverse offsetting process; building a good code for generating multivariate adaptive regression splines; and investigating the use of genetic programming to generate parametric geometry models of airplanes. These will involve mathematical approaches such as Parametric Splines, NURBS, Point Clouds, Level-Set Methods, Finite Element and Finite Volume Analysis, Image Processing, Computer Graphics, etc. The CGU-Boeing partnership will (i) provide students with experience for a career in industry or government, far beyond normal university training, (ii) sustain a curriculum attuned to real-world applications, (iii) foster an ongoing dialog between faculty and external scientists and bring industrial trends to campus, (iv) alert industry to new techniques developed in academia, (v) allow business and industry to draw upon the intellectual and physical resources of the Claremont Colleges, and (vi) develop specific projects to be addressed by joint teams of faculty members, students, and industry. This GOALI project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS).