MC 5501 and Zoom (email compmath@uwaterloo.ca for Zoom link)
Speaker
Teseo Schneider | University of Victoria
Title
Robust Geometry Processing for Physical Simulation
Abstract
The numerical solution of partial differential equations (PDE) is ubiquitously used for physical simulation in scientific computing, computer graphics, and engineering. Ideally, a PDE solver should be opaque: the user provides as input the domain boundary, boundary conditions, and the governing equations, and the code returns an evaluator that can compute the solution's value at any point of the input domain. This is surprisingly far from the case for all existing open-source or commercial software, despite the research efforts in this direction and the significant academic and industrial interest. To a large extent, this is due to a lack of robustness and generality in the geometry processing algorithms used to convert raw geometrical data into a format suitable for a PDE solver.
I will discuss the limitations of the current state of the art and present a proposal for an integrated pipeline, considering data acquisition, meshing, basis design, and numerical optimization as a single challenge, where tradeoffs can be made between different phases to increase automation and efficiency. I will demonstrate that this integrated approach offers many advantages while opening exciting new geometry processing challenges and that a fully opaque meshing and analysis solution is already possible for heat transfer and elasticity problems with contact. I will present a set of applications enabled by this approach in force measurements in biology, shape design in mechanical engineering, stress estimation in biomechanics, and simulation of deformable objects in graphics.