Simulation-Based Engineering Laboratory

SBEL purchased two new computers, including one that supports the use of two Nvidia 8800 GTXs and two Nvidia Tesla C870s simulataneously. The specifications of these computers are given on the Hardware page.

Graduate students Justin Madsen and Yakira Braden both received Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium Graduate Fellowship grants for 2008-2009. Justin will be working on implementing tracked vehicle simulations to validate a novel fixed-point iterative process to determine contact forces. He then hopes to implement his simulations on commodity graphics cards to incorporate sand dynamics into his tracked vehicle simulations.

Nick Schafer presented his work on numerical methods for Molecular Dynamics at the Undergraduate Symposium 2008 in Madison, WI.

Lab undergraduate student Kyle Schmitt accepted a graduation admission offer from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At MIT, Kyle will pursue a MS degree working under Pr. Hover on a project involving the dynamics of an electric ship confronted with power transience and uncertainty.

Lab graduate student Justin Madsen is one of 22 University of Wisconsin students to receive this year's University Book Store Academic Excellence Award. This is a $1,000 cash prize in recognition of completing an outstanding independent project in either research or a creative art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Undergraduate lab student Toby Heyn was awarded a Department of Mechanical Engineering Award for the 2008-2009 academic year. The award will provide funding for his first year of Graduate School.

NVIDIA Corporation made a hardware donation to the Simulation-Based Engineering Lab to support research in the area of Granular Flow Dynamics.  The lab received a set of eight high-end NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX video cards, and two TESLA C870 GPUs.  The cards are to be used for GPU computing on large dynamics problems and a new High Performance Computing in Engineering class, ME964, offered by Dan Negrut in Fall of 2008.

Undergraduate lab student Kyle Schmitt was granted a summer Research Aide position in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Lab. There he will be working on a large-scale stochastic optimization problem with mathematician Mihai Anistescu.

Justin Madsen graduated with a BS in Mechanical Engineering from UW-Madison

Nick Schafer presented his work on numerical methods for Molecular Dynamics at the 2007 ASME IDETC in Las Vegas, NV.

Nick Schafer presented his work on numerical methods for Molecular Dynamics at the 17th Annual Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium conference.

Nick Schafer was awarded a Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium Undergraduate Research Award and a Hilldale Undergraduate/Faculty Research Award. The topic of research was an investigation on new numerical methods for Molecular Dynamics.

Toby Heyn was awarded a Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium Undergraduate Research Award. The topic of research was the use of discrete modeling techniques and large scale parallel computation to investigate sand dynamics.

Nick Schafer began working on numerical methods for Molecular Dynamics.

Justin Madsen Joined the lab as an undergraduate

Nick Schafer joined the lab as an undergraduate in the Physics department to study electronic structure computation and flexible body contact mechanics under Dan Negrut.

Toby Heyn accepted a one semester appointment with Argonne National Laboratory. He will work from Madison and continue assisting with the Electronic Structure Computation project done in collaboration between SBEL and ANL.

Makarand Datar joined the lab as a graduate student under Dan Negrut.

Kyle Schmitt joined the Simulation Based Engineering Lab as an undergraduate student, working on uncertainty quantification in dynamic systems.

Toby Heyn joined the lab as an undergraduate.