Master Thesis Projects - in ModSimCompMech

The research group in Modeling and simulation of complex mechanical systems offer projects mainly in computational science and engineering. Your background could be applied mathematics, computer science, computational physics, control, mechanical engineering, robotics - but this is not exclusive. Please contact us with your interest and CV. Feel free also to propose thesis project by yourself.

Announced projects

Algorithms and software for co-simulation

Co-simulation is when software packages are coupled together as black boxes and this poses a number of stability problems. Algorithms and numerical methods are being investigated at UMIT in conjunction with a large project involving Scania and Volvo Cars, but there is a need to perform large scale testing and analysis of these. Of interest here is a study of adaptive time stepping if possible at all.

Simulation of mining vehicles and granular crash berms

The aim of the project is to find an optimal geometry/material for the berm and to determine their energy absorption capacity. This requires modeling and simulation of a haul truck running into a crash berm. The specific aims of the thesis can be summarized as follows.

• model calibration of granular material and haul truck based on full-scale experiments
• exploration of the crash berm design space using rigid multibody simulation
• identification of optimal parameters and of critical scenarios

Nonsmooth, analytical models for electric machinery for multidomain simulations

The variational principle of classical mechanics can be used to simulate multidomain physical systems, including multibody dynamics, electronics, hydraulics, and electric machinery. This can also be combined with methods for nonsmooth mechanics, i.e., systems subject to discontinuities such as impacts, contacts, switching modes, etc.

We have previously developed methods for rigid multibody with frictional contacts, non-smooth hydraulics and non-smooth electronics, all of which turned out to be much faster than available software packages for the same level of accuracy.

Extending this to include electrical motors will allow for comprehensive simulation of robots for instance, but also electric cars and such.

Previous projects

• Projected conjugate-gradient solver for contacting rigid bodies on GPGPU
• Parallel projected Gauss-Seidel solver for large-scale granular matter - Examining the physics of the parallel solver and development of a multigrid solver (Johan Sundberg)
• Discrete time variational mechanics of multidomain systems: Applications to coupled electronic, hydraulic, and multibody systems (Tomas Sjöström)
• A Parallel Blocked Multifrontal Implementation of Colesky Factorization for Sparse Matrices (Olof Sabelström)
• A constraint based viscoplastic fluid model of granular matter (John Nordberg)
• Discrete event simulations in forestry technology (Linus Jundén)
• Constraint Fluids on GPU* (Martin Nilsson)
• Parallel Simulation of Particle Fluids* (Mattias Linde)
• Phun* (Emil Ernefeldt)
• Realtime Simulation of Wires (Fredrik Nordfelth)
• Real-Time Simulation of Deformable Objects (Niklas Melin)
• Rigid Body Simulation of Macro Molecules (Christian Svebilius)
• Simulation of off-road Vehicle (Erik Linder)
• Shared Control of Mechanical Systems in Virtual Environments (Anders Hansson)
• Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics on the Cell Broadband Engine* (Nils Hjelte)
• Smooth and nonsmooth approaches to simulation of granular matter (Stefan Hedman)
• ... and several more

'*' was run at VRLab

External projects