Nonparametric approach for uncertainty-based multidisciplinary design optimization considering limited data

Uncertainty-based multidisciplinary design optimization (UMDO) has been widely acknowledged as an advanced methodology to address competing objectives and reliable constraints of complex systems by coupling relationship of disciplines involved in the system. UMDO process consists of three parts. Two parts are to define the system with uncertainty and to formulate the design optimization problem. The third part is to quantitatively analyze the uncertainty of the system output considering the uncertainty propagation in the multidiscipline analysis. One of the major issues in the UMDO research is that the uncertainty propagation makes uncertainty analysis difficult in the complex system. The conventional methods are based on the parametric approach could possibly cause the error when the parametric approach has ill-estimated distribution because data is often insufficient or limited. Therefore, it is required to develop a nonparametric approach to directly use data. In this work, the nonparametric approach for uncertainty-based multidisciplinary design optimization considering limited data is proposed. To handle limited data, three processes are also adopted. To verify the performance of the proposed method, mathematical and engineering examples are illustrated.     

CAE-based proper design method for the efficient production of hydraulic cylinder

Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology - This paper concerns on the simulation-based proper design method for the efficient production of hydraulic cylinders using CAE techniques which are...     

Reliability-based design optimization of a pick-up device of a manganese nodule pilot mining robot using the Coandă effect

Design of a pick-up device using the Coandă effect in a deep-sea mining robot is vital to develop a reliable and sustainable deep-sea mining system. One of the crucial performance metrics of this device is the collection efficiency since it affects the mining efficiency of the entire system. However, the collection efficiency is significantly affected by the uncertainties of shape, size and mass of manganese nodules on the seabed. In this study, reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) was performed to improve the reliability of the collection efficiency of the pick-up device under these environmental uncertainties. First, a computational model based on the Coandă effect that predicts the collection efficiency of the pick-up device was developed. Next, RBDO based on the Akaike information criterion method was employed to design the pick-up device by using this model. The results demonstrated that the proposed design methodology significantly improved the design of the pick-up device for the pilot mining robot.

     

Estimation of body and tail distribution under extreme events for reliability analysis

In the past decades, many reliability analyses have been developed and applied to engineering fields considering uncertainties of input and output random variables as normal distributions. However, when input uncertainty is taken into the system as extreme events such as weather, temperature, environmental conditions etc., output distribution cannot be described by normal distribution. On the other hand, one of distributions to analyze reliability of a system under extreme events is generalized Pareto distribution. Generalized Pareto distribution has been developed and applied for modelling extreme events. However, conventional methods estimate only the shape and scale parameters by assuming that the location parameter is chosen by experiences focused only on the tail distribution. However, since the tail distribution affected by the body distribution and vice versa, both the body and tail distributions should be considered when the parameters of distribution are estimated. In this study, therefore, a new parameter estimation method is proposed to determine shape, scale and location parameters simultaneously by combining likelihood functions of body and tail distributions using Akaike information criterion and generalized Pareto distribution, respectively. Finally, the parameters of body and tail distributions are estimated by maximum likelihood estimation. The proposed method is verified by using mathematical examples with and without inclusion of extreme events. Results show that the proposed method can estimate parameters and distributions for body and tail distributions as well as the more accurate reliability of system under extreme events.