• Dr. Nam-Ho Kim
  • University of Florida
  • Holden Auditorium (Room 112)
  • 4:00 p.m.
  • Faculty Host: Dr. Seongim Choi

Reliability-based design optimization has been developed in order to provide safety for complex engineering systems, such as aircraft, automotive, bridges and nuclear power plants. These systems are not only made safe by good design, but through an array of risk-reduction measures (i.e., safety measures) during their lifecycle, such as building-block tests during development, quality control during manufacturing, inspection and maintenance during operation,and accident investigation to find a possible cause of the accident. Current design practices for minimum risk or high reliability only account for uncertainty information available at the design stage without considering uncertainty reductions through safety measures, hence falling short of achieving optimal solutions in terms of cost and safety.

The objective of this presentation is to formulate safety measures as uncertainty reduction tools and to quantify their effects on the system reliability. The presentation includes (1) comparison between repeating tests and exploring design space for uncertainty reduction and detecting un-recognized failure modes, (2) uncertainty propagation in building-block process and the effect of tests, (3) determining optimal tolerances for trade-off between performance (weight) and manufacturing cost, (4) utilizing health monitoring system to predict the remaining useful life with a desired level of reliability, and (5) cost-effectiveness of accident investigation to improve system safety.

Biosketch: Dr. Nam-Ho Kim is currently a Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Florida.  He graduated with a Ph.D. in the Department of Mechanical Engineering from the University of Iowa in 1999 and worked at the Center for Computer-Aided Design as a postdoctoral associate until 2001. His research interests include design under uncertainty, prognostics and health management, nonlinear structural mechanics and design sensitivity analysis. He has been authors and co-authors of five books and more than two hundred journal articles and conference proceedings. He is an Associate Fellow of American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a member of the Editorial Boards of Journal of Mechanical Design, Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization and International Journal of Reliability and Safety.