Hybridization of stochastic reduced basis methods with polynomial chaos expansions

We propose a hybrid formulation combining stochastic reduced basis methods with polynomial chaos expansions for solving linear random algebraic equations arising from discretization of stochastic partial differential equations. Our objective is to generalize stochastic reduced basis projection schemes to non-Gaussian uncertainty models and simplify the implementation of higher-order approximations. We employ basis vectors spanning the preconditioned stochastic Krylov subspace to represent the solution process. In the present formulation, the polynomial chaos decomposition technique is used to represent the stochastic basis vectors in terms of multidimensional Hermite polynomials. The Galerkin projection scheme is then employed to compute the undetermined coefficients in the reduced basis approximation. We present numerical studies on a linear structural problem where the Youngs modulus is represented using Gaussian as well as lognormal models to illustrate the performance of the hybrid stochastic reduced basis projection scheme. Comparison studies with the spectral stochastic finite element method suggest that the proposed hybrid formulation gives results of comparable accuracy at a lower computational cost.     

Global sensitivity analysis by polynomial dimensional decomposition

This paper presents a polynomial dimensional decomposition (PDD) method for global sensitivity analysis of stochastic systems subject to independent random input following arbitrary probability distributions. The method involves Fourier-polynomial expansions of lower-variate component functions of a stochastic response by measure-consistent orthonormal polynomial bases, analytical formulae for calculating the global sensitivity indices in terms of the expansion coefficients, and dimension-reduction integration for estimating the expansion coefficients. Due to identical dimensional structures of PDD and analysis-of-variance decomposition, the proposed method facilitates simple and direct calculation of the global sensitivity indices. Numerical results of the global sensitivity indices computed for smooth systems reveal significantly higher convergence rates of the PDD approximation than those from existing methods, including polynomial chaos expansion, random balance design, state-dependent parameter, improved Sobol's method, and sampling-based methods. However, for non-smooth functions, the convergence properties of the PDD solution deteriorate to a great extent, warranting further improvements. The computational complexity of the PDD method is polynomial, as opposed to exponential, thereby alleviating the curse of dimensionality to some extent.     

Neumann enriched polynomial chaos approach for stochastic finite element problems

An enrichment scheme based upon the Neumann expansion method is proposed to augment the deterministic coefficient vectors associated with the polynomial chaos expansion method. The proposed approach relies upon a split of the random variables into two statistically independent sets. The principal variability of the system is captured by propagating a limited number of random variables through a low-ordered polynomial chaos expansion method. The remaining random variables are propagated by a Neumann expansion method. In turn, the random variables associated with the Neumann expansion method are utilised to enrich the polynomial chaos approach. The effect of this enrichment is explicitly captured in a new augmented definition of the coefficients of the polynomial chaos expansion. This approach allows one to consider a larger number of random variables within the scope of spectral stochastic finite element analysis in a computationally efficient manner. Closed-form expressions for the first two response moments are provided. The proposed enrichment method is used to analyse two numerical examples: the bending of a cantilever beam and the flow through porous media. Both systems contain distributed stochastic properties. The results are compared with those obtained using direct Monte Carlo simulations and using the classical polynomial chaos expansion approach.     

Polynomial chaos‐based extended Padé expansion in structural dynamics

The response of a random dynamical system is totally characterized by its probability density function (pdf). However, determining a pdf by a direct approach requires a high numerical cost; similarly, surrogate models such as direct polynomial chaos expansions are not generally efficient, especially around the eigenfrequencies of the dynamical system. In the present study, a new approach based on Padé approximants to obtain moments and pdf of the dynamic response in the frequency domain is proposed. A key difference between the direct polynomial chaos representation and the Padé representation is that the Padé approach has polynomials in both numerator and denominator. For frequency response functions, the denominator plays a vital role as it contains the information related to resonance frequencies, which are uncertain. A Galerkin approach in conjunction with polynomial chaos is proposed for the Padé approximation. Another physics‐based approach, utilizing polynomial chaos expansions of the random eigenmodes, is proposed and compared with the proposed Padé approach. It is shown that both methods give accurate results even if a very low degree of the polynomial expansion is used. The methods are demonstrated for two degree‐of‐freedom system with one and two uncertain parameters. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A non‐intrusive model reduction approach for polynomial chaos expansion using proper orthogonal decomposition

In this paper, a non‐intrusive stochastic model reduction scheme is developed for polynomial chaos representation using proper orthogonal decomposition. The main idea is to extract the optimal orthogonal basis via inexpensive calculations on a coarse mesh and then use them for the fine‐scale analysis. To validate the developed reduced‐order model, the method is implemented to: (1) the stochastic steady‐state heat diffusion in a square slab; (2) the incompressible, two‐dimensional laminar boundary‐layer over a flat plate with uncertainties in free‐stream velocity and physical properties; and (3) the highly nonlinear Ackley function with uncertain coefficients. For the heat diffusion problem, the thermal conductivity of the slab is assumed to be a stochastic field with known exponential covariance function and approximated via the Karhunen–Loève expansion. In all three test cases, the input random parameters are assumed to be uniformly distributed, and a polynomial chaos expansion is found using the regression method. The Sobol's quasi‐random sequence is used to generate the sample points. The numerical results of the three test cases show that the non‐intrusive model reduction scheme is able to produce satisfactory results for the statistical quantities of interest. It is found that the developed non‐intrusive model reduction scheme is computationally more efficient than the classical polynomial chaos expansion for uncertainty quantification of stochastic problems. The performance of the developed scheme becomes more apparent for the problems with larger stochastic dimensions and those requiring higher polynomial order for the stochastic discretization. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Stochastic projection schemes for deterministic linear elliptic partial differential equations on random domains

We present stochastic projection schemes for approximating the solution of a class of deterministic linear elliptic partial differential equations defined on random domains. The key idea is to carry out spatial discretization using a combination of finite element methods and stochastic mesh representations. We prove a result to establish the conditions that the input uncertainty model must satisfy to ensure the validity of the stochastic mesh representation and hence the well posedness of the problem. Finite element spatial discretization of the governing equations using a stochastic mesh representation results in a linear random algebraic system of equations in a polynomial chaos basis whose coefficients of expansion can be non‐intrusively computed either at the element or the global level. The resulting randomly parametrized algebraic equations are solved using stochastic projection schemes to approximate the response statistics. The proposed approach is demonstrated for modeling diffusion in a square domain with a rough wall and heat transfer analysis of a three‐dimensional gas turbine blade model with uncertainty in the cooling core geometry. The numerical results are compared against Monte–Carlo simulations, and it is shown that the proposed approach provides high‐quality approximations for the first two statistical moments at modest computational effort. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Identification of composite uncertain material parameters from experimental modal data

Stochastic analysis of structures using probability methods requires the statistical knowledge of uncertain material parameters. This is often quite easier to identify these statistics indirectly from structure response by solving an inverse stochastic problem. In this paper, a robust and efficient inverse stochastic method based on the non-sampling generalized polynomial chaos method is presented for identifying uncertain elastic parameters from experimental modal data. A data set on natural frequencies is collected from experimental modal analysis for sample orthotropic plates. The Pearson model is used to identify the distribution functions of the measured natural frequencies. This realization is then employed to construct the random orthogonal basis for each vibration mode. The uncertain parameters are represented by polynomial chaos expansions with unknown coefficients and the same random orthogonal basis as the vibration modes. The coefficients are identified via a stochastic inverse problem. The results show good agreement with experimental data.     

Adaptive polynomial chaos expansions applied to statistics of extremes in nonlinear random vibration

This paper presents a new module towards the development of efficient computational stochastic mechanics. Specifically, the possibility of an adaptive polynomial chaos expansion is investigated. Adaptivity in this context refers to retaining, through an iterative procedure, only those terms in a representation of the solution process that are significant to the numerical evaluation of the solution. The technique can be applied to the calculation of statistics of extremes for nongaussian processes. The only assumption involved is that these processes be the response of a nonlinear oscillator excited by a general stochastic process. The proposed technique is an extension of a technique developed by the second author for the solution of general nonlinear random vibration problems. Accordingly, the response process is represented using its Karhunen-Loeve expansion. This expansion allows for the optimal encapsulation of the information contained in the stochastic process into a set of discrete random variables. The response process is then expanded using the polynomial chaos basis, which is a complete orthogonal set in the space of second-order random variables. The time dependent coefficients in this expansion are then computed by using a Galerkin projection scheme which minimizes the approximation error involved in using a finite-dimensional subspace. These coefficients completely characterize the solution process, and the accuracy of the approximation can be assessed by comparing the contribution of successive coefficients. A significant contribution of this paper is the development and implimentation of adaptive schemes for the polynomial chaos expansion. These schemes permit the inclusion of only those terms in the expansion that have a significant contribution.     

Time response of structures with uncertain parameters under stochastic inputs based on coupled polynomial chaos expansion and component mode synthesis methods

This article presents a numerical procedure to compute the stochastic dynamic response of large finite element models with uncertain parameters based on polynomial chaos and component mode synthesis methods. Polynomial chaos expansions at higher orders are used to derive the statistical solution of the dynamic response as well as the Monte Carlo simulation procedure. Based on various component mode synthesis methods, the size of the model is reduced. These methods are coupled with polynomial chaos expansion and the explicit mathematical formulations are given. Numerical results illustrating the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed coupled methodological procedures are presented.     

Static condensation based reduced order modelling of stochastically parametered large ordered systems

A surrogate stochastic reduced order model is developed for the analysis of randomly parametered structural systems with complex geometries. It is assumed that the mathematical model is available in terms of large ordered finite element (FE) matrices. The structure material properties are assumed to have spatial random inhomogeneities and are modelled as non-Gaussian random fields. A polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) based framework is developed for modelling the random fields directly from measurements and for uncertainty quantification of the response. Difficulties in implementing PCE due to geometrical complexities are circumvented by adopting PCE on a geometrically regular domain that bounds the physical domain and are shown to lead to mathematically equivalent representation. The static condensation technique is subsequently extended for stochastic cases based on PCE formalism to obtain reduced order stochastic FE models. The efficacy of the method is illustrated through two numerical examples.     

Generalized polynomial chaos and random oscillators

We present a new approach to obtain solutions for general random oscillators using a broad class of polynomial chaos expansions, which are more efficient than the classical Wiener–Hermite expansions. The approach is general but here we present results for linear oscillators only with random forcing or random coefficients. In this context, we are able to obtain relatively sharp error estimates in the representation of the stochastic input as well as the solution. We have also performed computational comparisons with Monte Carlo simulations which show that the new approach can be orders of magnitude faster, especially for compact distributions. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A reduced polynomial chaos expansion method for the stochastic finite element analysis

The stochastic finite element analysis of elliptic type partial differential equations is considered. A reduced method of the spectral stochastic finite element method using polynomial chaos is proposed. The method is based on the spectral decomposition of the deterministic system matrix. The reduction is achieved by retaining only the dominant eigenvalues and eigenvectors. The response of the reduced system is expanded as a series of Hermite polynomials, and a Galerkin error minimization approach is applied to obtain the deterministic coefficients of the expansion. The moments and probability density function of the solution are obtained by a process similar to the classical spectral stochastic finite element method. The method is illustrated using three carefully selected numerical examples, namely, bending of a stochastic beam, flow through porous media with stochastic permeability and transverse bending of a plate with stochastic properties. The results obtained from the proposed method are compared with classical polynomial chaos and direct Monte Carlo simulation results.     

Error estimation in a stochastic finite element method in electrokinetics

Input data to a numerical model are not necessarily well known. Uncertainties may exist both in material properties and in the geometry of the device. They can be due, for instance, to ageing or imperfections in the manufacturing process. Input data can be modelled as random variables leading to a stochastic model. In electromagnetism, this leads to solution of a stochastic partial differential equation system. The solution can be approximated by a linear combination of basis functions rising from the tensorial product of the basis functions used to discretize the space (nodal shape function for example) and basis functions used to discretize the random dimension (a polynomial chaos expansion for example). Some methods (SSFEM, collocation) have been proposed in the literature to calculate such approximation. The issue is then how to compare the different approaches in an objective way. One solution is to use an appropriate a posteriori numerical error estimator. In this paper, we present an error estimator based on the constitutive relation error in electrokinetics, which allows the calculation of the distance between an average solution and the unknown exact solution. The method of calculation of the error is detailed in this paper from two solutions that satisfy the two equilibrium equations. In an example, we compare two different approximations (Legendre and Hermite polynomial chaos expansions) for the random dimension using the proposed error estimator. In addition, we show how to choose the appropriate order for the polynomial chaos expansion for the proposed error estimator. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A polynomial chaos method for arbitrary random inputs using B-splines

Isogeometric analysis which extends the finite element method through the usage of B-splines has become well established in engineering analysis and design procedures. In this paper, this concept is considered in context with the methodology of polynomial chaos as applied to computational stochastic mechanics. In this regard it is noted that many random processes used in several applications can be approximated by the chaos representation by truncating the associated series expansion. Ordinarily, the basis of these series are orthogonal Hermite polynomials which are replaced by B-spline basis functions. Further, the convergence of the B-spline chaos is presented and substantiated by numerical results. Furthermore, it is pointed out, that the B-spline expansion is a generalization of the Legendre multi-element generalized polynomial chaos expansion, which is proven by solving several stochastic differential equations.     

Probabilistic surrogate models for uncertainty analysis: Dimension reduction-based polynomial chaos expansion

This paper presents an approach for efficient uncertainty analysis (UA) using an intrusive generalized polynomial chaos (gPC) expansion. The key step of the gPC-based uncertainty quantification ( UQ) is the stochastic Galerkin (SG) projection, which can convert a stochastic model into a set of coupled deterministic models. The SG projection generally yields a high-dimensional integration problem with respect to the number of random variables used to describe the parametric uncertainties in a model. However, when the number of uncertainties is large and when the governing equation of the system is highly nonlinear, the SG approach-based gPC can be challenging to derive explicit expressions for the gPC coefficients because of the low convergence in the SG projection. To tackle this challenge, we propose to use a bivariate dimension reduction method (BiDRM) in this work to approximate a high-dimensional integral in SG projection with a few one- and two-dimensional integrations. The efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated with three different examples, including chemical reactions and cell signaling. As compared to other UA methods, such as the Monte Carlo simulations and nonintrusive stochastic collocation (SC), the proposed method shows its superior performance in terms of computational efficiency and UA accuracy.     

Collocation-based stochastic finite element analysis for random field problems

A stochastic response surface method (SRSM) which has been previously proposed for problems dealing only with random variables is extended in this paper for problems in which physical properties exhibit spatial random variation and may be modeled as random fields. The formalism of the extended SRSM is similar to the spectral stochastic finite element method (SSFEM) in the sense that both of them utilize Karhunen–Loeve (K–L) expansion to represent the input, and polynomial chaos expansion to represent the output. However, the coefficients in the polynomial chaos expansion are calculated using a probabilistic collocation approach in SRSM. This strategy helps us to decouple the finite element and stochastic computations, and the finite element code can be treated as a black box, as in the case of a commercial code. The collocation-based SRSM approach is compared in this paper with an existing analytical SSFEM approach, which uses a Galerkin-based weighted residual formulation, and with a black-box SSFEM approach, which uses Latin Hypercube sampling for the design of experiments. Numerical examples are used to illustrate the features of the extended SRSM and to compare its efficiency and accuracy with the existing analytical and black-box versions of SSFEM.     

Fast numerical methods for robust optimal design

A fast numerical approach for robust design optimization is presented. The core of the method is based on the state-of-the-art fast numerical methods for stochastic computations with parametric uncertainty. These methods employ generalized polynomial chaos (gPC) as a high-order representation for random quantities and a stochastic Galerkin (SG) or stochastic collocation (SC) approach to transform the original stochastic governing equations to a set of deterministic equations. The gPC-based SG and SC algorithms are able to produce highly accurate stochastic solutions with (much) reduced computational cost. It is demonstrated that they can serve as efficient forward problem solvers in robust design problems. Possible alternative definitions for robustness are also discussed. Traditional robust optimization seeks to minimize the variance (or standard deviation) of the response function while optimizing its mean. It can be shown that although variance can be used as a measure of uncertainty, it is a weak measure and may not fully reflect the output variability. Subsequently a strong measure in terms of the sensitivity derivatives of the response function is proposed as an alternative robust optimization definition. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of the gPC-based algorithms, in both the traditional weak measure and the newly proposed strong measure.     

Hierarchical surrogate model with dimensionality reduction technique for high-dimensional uncertainty propagation

In this article, hierarchical surrogate model combined with dimensionality reduction technique is investigated for uncertainty propagation of high-dimensional problems. In the proposed method, a low-fidelity sparse polynomial chaos expansion model is first constructed to capture the global trend of model response and exploit a low-dimensional active subspace (AS). Then a high-fidelity (HF) stochastic Kriging model is built on the reduced space by mapping the original high-dimensional input onto the identified AS. The effective dimensionality of the AS is estimated by maximum likelihood estimation technique. Finally, an accurate HF surrogate model is obtained for uncertainty propagation of high-dimensional stochastic problems. The proposed method is validated by two challenging high-dimensional stochastic examples, and the results demonstrate that our method is effective for high-dimensional uncertainty propagation.     

Measure transformation and efficient quadrature in reduced‐dimensional stochastic modeling of coupled problems

Coupled problems with various combinations of multiple physics, scales, and domains are found in numerous areas of science and engineering. A key challenge in the formulation and implementation of corresponding coupled numerical models is to facilitate the communication of information across physics, scale, and domain interfaces, as well as between the iterations of solvers used for response computations. In a probabilistic context, any information that is to be communicated between subproblems or iterations should be characterized by an appropriate probabilistic representation. Although the number of sources of uncertainty can be expected to be large in most coupled problems, our contention is that exchanged probabilistic information often resides in a considerably lower‐dimensional space than the sources themselves. In this work, we thus propose to use a dimension reduction technique for obtaining the representation of the exchanged information, and we propose a measure transformation technique that allows subproblem implementations to exploit this dimension reduction to achieve computational gains. The effectiveness of the proposed dimension reduction and measure transformation methodology is demonstrated through a multiphysics problem relevant to nuclear engineering. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sparse polynomial surrogates for non-intrusive,high-dimensional uncertainty quantification of aeroelastic computations

This paper is concerned with aircraft aeroelastic interactions and the propagation of parametric uncertainties in numerical simulations using high-fidelity fluid flow solvers. More specifically, the influence of variable operational and structural parameters (random inputs) on the drag performance and deformation (outputs) of a flexible wing in transonic regime, is assessed. Because of the complexity of fluid flow solvers, non-intrusive uncertainty quantification techniques are favored. Polynomial surrogate models based on homogeneous chaos expansions in the random inputs are commonly considered in this respect. The polynomial expansion coefficients are constructed using either structured sampling sets of the input parameters, as Gauss quadrature nodes, or unstructured sampling sets, as in Monte-Carlo methods. In complex systems such as the advanced aeroelastic test case studied here, the output quantities of interest generally depend only weakly on the multiple cross-interactions between the random inputs. Consequently, only low-order polynomials significantly contribute to their surrogates, which thus have a sparse structure in the underlying polynomial bases. This feature prompts to use compressed sensing, or compressive sampling theory for the construction of the polynomial surrogates. The proposed methodology is non-adapted and considers unstructured sampling sets orders of magnitude smaller than the ones required by the usual techniques with structured sampling sets. It is illustrated in the present work for a moderately to high dimensional parametric space.