Seminar – Villages, Power Plants, Ag Residue: Addressing Model Integration Challenges in Engineering Decision Making – Dr. Bryden

Villages, Power Plants, Ag Residue: Addressing Model Integration Challenges in Engineering Decision Making

Dr. Kenneth “Mark” Bryden
Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Program Director for Simulation, Modeling and Decision Science at the Ames Laboratory
Iowa State University
Group Website: https://www.ameslab.gov/smds

ABSTRACT

Villages in the developing world, clean power plants, and sustainable farms are all complex systems that need robust engineering decision-making tools. The challenge is that nearly all engineered products and processes are holistic complex systems composed of interdependent parts. Each of these parts is commonly analyzed with a separate model or set of models, and in many cases the interaction between the models is as important as the models themselves to understanding the behavior and performance of the system. Computational time, differing vocabularies between various disciplines, and the disparate nature of model creation all create barriers to the use of detailed model sets in engineering decision making. In this seminar a novel decentralized approach to developing unified design environments based on creating federations of autonomous models will be introduced. These federated model sets consist of self-describing information entities (e.g., models, data, and user input); a library that contains the set of available models and manages the model development community; a federation schema that defines the purpose of the federation, describes the models used in the federation, and defines the topology of the federation; and a federation management system that coordinates information transport, convergence of boundary conditions, and error. Current integration projects including development of a cyber physical system for hybrid power plant design and testing, integration of CAD models and data to improve manufacturing processes, large-scale integration of multiple model sets to address the availability of agricultural residue for energy, and an extended village energy model to guide energy projects in the developing world will be used to examine key aspects of these federated model sets.

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Kenneth “Mark” Bryden is an accomplished practicing engineer and a popular, pragmatic engineering professor at Iowa State University who teaches from a fundamentals-to-practice perspective. He is the founding program director of the Simulation, Modeling, and Decision Science program at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, where he has built a multiyear, $10+ million program. In addition, for more than 15 years he has worked on energy systems for the poor in a number of developing countries. Professor Bryden has published more than 180 peer-reviewed articles and co-authored the textbook Combustion Engineering. He has founded two successful startups based on his research work and founded the nonprofit ETHOS, a community of 150+ researchers focused on meeting the needs for clean village energy in the developing world. He has received three R&D 100 awards, two Regional Excellence in Technology Transfer awards, and a National Excellence in Technology Transfer award. In 2013 he and his coauthors received the ASME Melville Medal