Visualizing engineering design and industrial innovation
At the New York State Center for Engineering Design and Industrial Innovation (NYSCEDII), engineers and applied scientists are using cutting-edge techniques—from visualization, to simulation, to optimization—to transform industries and pioneer new research.
Established in 2000 and headed by Christina Bloebaum, professor of competitive product and process design in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, NYSCEDII is one of only a handful of engineering-oriented visualization centers in the country.
NYSCEDII has become a leading center for the application and development of high-end visualization, simulation, and optimization technologies to address complex analysis and design problems, such as those found in product research, design, and manufacturing. The center’s emphasis on visualization, haptics, data analysis, and collaborative tools complement economic development and training activities in the Western New York region and across the state.
The center’s breadth of applications makes its research particularly important. From plant design to product optimization to prototype visualization, the center has worked to make all phases of industry more efficient. In a project with Praxair, a top-ten industrial gases company, NYSCEDII has been using optimization and visualization techniques to find an optimal layout for an air-separation-plant cold box. The tool developed has the potential to reduce design time on one product from a few months to a few days.
In another project, a team of researchers led by Kemper Lewis, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and including Bloebaum, Kenneth English, Aidong Zhang, Ann Bisantz, and Eliot Winer is developing new visualization techniques for the design and prototyping of complex systems. The developed techniques allow users to make trade-off decisions about product development with a greater amount of knowledge than in traditional processes. Rapid Virtual Prototyping facilitates compromises by allowing geographically distributed participants to make decisions that take into account various degrees of uncertainty in product development.
NYSCEDII’s advanced imaging capabilities have resulted in benefits in health care and safety. Working with the Toshiba Stroke Research Center, UB Center for Advanced Biomedical and Bioengineering Technology, Clarix Technologies, and SGI Inc., researchers at NYSCEDII have developed a multipurpose medical image analysis and visualization programming interface. The program is able to obtain information from digital medical files, parse this information into standard formatted image files, analyze the image to generate a 3-D surface model, manipulate the image to increase visual clarity, and extract particular features or objects from the image. The program will help medical professionals to better examine and diagnose patients.
The center also has paired with Dr. J. Gayle Beck from the UB Center for Anxiety Research to develop the first real-time virtual-reality driving simulator to treat car-accident victims suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The driving simulator includes a steering wheel and pedals, a six-degrees-of-freedom electric motion base, and a stereoscopic projector display, creating a system that is extremely customizable and realistic. Patients are slowly acclimated to driving again by working from a safe environment to one that is reminiscent of the original accident, including weather and particular road conditions.
In biological research, simulation has also been used to investigate the mechanical behavior of extinct animals, such as the saber-toothed cat Smilodon fatalis. By creating anatomically and biomechanically accurate virtual models of modern animals, researchers have established how various bones move and what muscular forces are needed to create movements during activities, such as biting. This baseline allows the virtual reconstruction of fossilized remains. This same technology can be used for human studies.
Currently, NYSCEDII is working on further developing a fire egress simulation system, called Vacate, that surpasses the leading tool available. Researchers have also filed for a patent on a visualization tool that gives users new ways to display complex data sets in such fields as economics.
The range of projects supported by NYSCEDII gives clear testimony to the breadth of the center’s capabilities. As this work demonstrates, visualization, simulation, and modeling let UB researchers see the future of industrial innovation, bringing virtual ideas into the real world of industry and research.
