INTERVAL FINITE VOLUME METHOD FOR UNCERTAINTY SIMULATION OF TWO-DIMENSIONAL RIVER WATER QUALITY

Under the interval uncertainties, by incorporating the discretization form offinite volume method and interval algebra theory, an Interval Finite Volume Method (IF-VM) wasdeveloped to solve water quality simulation issues for two-dimensional river when lacking effectivedata of flow velocity and flow quantity. The IFVM was practically applied to a segment of theXiangjiang River because the Project of Hunan Inland Waterway Multipurpose must be started workingafter the environmental impact assessment for it. The simulation results suggest that there existrather apparent pollution zones of BOD_5 downstream the Dongqiaogang discharger and that of CODdownstream Xiaoxiangjie discharger, but the pollution sources have no impact on the safety of thethree water plants located in this river segment. Although the developed IFVM is to be perfected, itis still a powerful tool under interval uncertainties for water environmental impact assessment,risk analysis, and water quality planning, etc. besides water quality simulation studied in thispaper.

Uncertainty Quantification of Numerical Simulation of Flows around a Cylinder Using Non-intrusive Polynomial Chaos

The uncertainty quantification of flows around a cylinder is studied by the non-intrusive polynomial chaos method. Based on the validation with benchmark results, discussions are mainly focused on the statistic properties of the peak lift and drag coefficients and base pressure drop over the cylinder with the uncertainties of viscosity coefficient and inflow boundary velocity. As for the numerical results of flows around a cylinder, influence of the inflow boundary velocity uncertainty is larger than that of viscosity. The results indeed demonstrate that a five-order degree of polynomial chaos expansion is enough to represent the solution of flow in this study.

A linear programming model for long-term mine planning in the presence of grade uncertainty and a stockpile

The complexity of an open pit production scheduling problem is increased by grade uncertainty. A method is presented to calculate the cost of uncertainty in a production schedule based on deviations from the target production. A mixed integer linear programming algorithm is formulated to find the min- ing sequence of blocks from a predefined pit shell and their respective destinations, with two objectives： to maximize the net present value of the operation and to minimize the cost of uncertainty. An efficient clustering technique reduces the number of var/ables to make the problem tractable. Also, the parameters that control the importance of uncertainty in the optimization problem are studied. The minimum annual mining capacity in presence of grade uncertainty is assessed. The method is illustrated with an oil sand deposit in northern Alberta.

Probabilistic Analysis and Design of HCP Nanowires:An Efficient Surrogate Based Molecular Dynamics Simulation Approach

We investigate the dependency of strain rate,temperature and size on yield strength of hexagonal close packed（HCP） nanowires based on large-scale molecular dynamics（MD） simulation.A variance-based analysis has been proposed to quantify relative sensitivity of the three controlling factors on the yield strength of the material.One of the major drawbacks of conventional MD simulation based studies is that the simulations are computationally very intensive and economically expensive.Large scale molecular dynamics simulation needs supercomputing access and the larger the number of atoms,the longer it takes time and computational resources.For this reason it becomes practically impossible to perform a robust and comprehensive analysis that requires multiple simulations such as sensitivity analysis,uncertainty quantification and optimization.We propose a novel surrogate based molecular dynamics（SBMD）simulation approach that enables us to carry out thousands of virtual simulations for different combinations of the controlling factors in a computationally efficient way by performing only few MD simulations.Following the SBMD simulation approach an efficient optimum design scheme has been developed to predict optimized size of the nanowire to maximize the yield strength.Subsequently the effect of inevitable uncertainty associated with the controlling factors has been quantified using Monte Carlo simulation.Though we have confined our analyses in this article for Magnesium nanowires only,the proposed approach can be extended to other materials for computationally intensive nano-scale investigation involving multiple factors of influence.

Stochastic model updating using distance discrimination analysis

This manuscript presents a stochastic model updating method, taking both uncertainties in models and variability in testing into account. The updated finite element（FE） models obtained through the proposed technique can aid in the analysis and design of structural systems. The authors developed a stochastic model updating method integrating distance discrimination analysis（DDA） and advanced Monte Carlo（MC） technique to（1） enable more efficient MC by using a response surface model,（2） calibrate parameters with an iterative test-analysis correlation based upon DDA, and（3） utilize and compare different distance functions as correlation metrics. Using DDA, the influence of distance functions on model updating results is analyzed. The proposed stochastic method makes it possible to obtain a precise model updating outcome with acceptable calculation cost. The stochastic method is demonstrated on a helicopter case study updated using both Euclidian and Mahalanobis distance metrics. It is observed that the selected distance function influences the iterative calibration process and thus, the calibration outcome, indicating that an integration of different metrics might yield improved results.