![[External Link]](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/eot2008/20090114065342im_/http://institute.lanl.gov/_images/icons/external_site.gif){kind=icon}
The Engineering Institute is a collaboration between LANL and the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) Jacobs School of Engineering whose mission is to develop a comprehensive approach for 1) conducting mission-driven, multidisciplinary engineering research and 2) recruiting, revitalization and retention of the current and future staff necessary to support LANL’s stockpile stewardship responsibilities. The scientific thrust of the Engineering Institute is damage prognosis, a multidisciplinary engineering science concerned with assessing the current condition and predicting the remaining life of aerospace, civil, and mechanical engineering infrastructure.
The components of the Engineering Institute are:
The LADSS addresses recruiting entry-level students into the program from across the country. The joint degree program addresses training of potential new hires and early-career staff, while also serving to retain mid-career staff who act as instructors and advisors for the early-career staff. In addition to meeting mission-driven research needs, the joint research projects also serve as a retention tool for staff at all career levels that collaborate with the UCSD faculty and students on these projects. The new technology development associated with these projects inherently provides the added benefit of a recruiting tool. Industry short courses provide an avenue of outreach to the engineering community at large as well as an additional, non-traditional form of peer review.
The EI was established in April, 2003 through a memorandum of understanding signed jointly by the Dean of the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering and the Associate Director Weapons Engineering and Manufacturing and a subsequent contract with UCSD. The EI is physically located in the Los Alamos Research Park and resides administratively in the Principal Associate Director for Science, Technology and Engineering’s office. It consists of a full-time director and program administrator with four additional technical staff members spending 20%-50% of their time on EI activities. Two other staff members spend 50%-100% of their time at the institute while they are working on their Ph. D. dissertations. Two students, one working on his MS thesis and another providing computer support are also assigned to the EI. Through its research and education activities the EI has collaborations with many LANL technical divisions.
The technology thrust of the EI is damage prognosis, a multidisciplinary engineering science concerned with assessing the current condition and predicting the remaining life of a wide variety of structural systems. Developing damage prognosis capabilities requires coordinated development of
These same three fundamental technology areas are essential to advancing engineering capabilities required for LANL’s stockpile stewardship mission, particularly with regards to the validation of the large-scale simulations needed in the absence of nuclear testing. Thus, the technical thrust of the EI is directly aligned with LANL’s core mission. Additionally, advances in damage prognosis capabilities offer the potential for significant life-safety and economic benefits to a variety of civilian and conventional defense applications associated with aerospace, mechanical, and civil infrastructure. These societal benefits coupled with the difficulties associated with multidisciplinary research make the development of damage prognosis solutions a “grand challenge” for engineering in the 21st century.
There are three educational components to the EI. The first is the LADSS, a very selective summer school in which top upper-level US-citizen undergraduate students (mean GPA > 3.8/4.0) from universities around the nation attend lectures and work in teams of three with a LANL mentor on research projects related to the EI’s technology focus. Their objective is to produce a conference publication summarizing their results by the end of the summer. The goal of this program is threefold:
Over the last seven years, 111 students from 34 academic institutions have participated in the summer school and nine such TSM’s have been hired. All but four of these students have gone on to graduate school.
The second component of the education program is a joint LANL/UCSD multidisciplinary graduate degree program. This multidisciplinary program was designed around LANL’s and industry needs for people trained in the areas of structural health monitoring, damage prognosis and validated simulations. This program cuts across traditional engineering department boundaries and involves all but one of the departments in the Jacobs School of Engineering. Consequently, many new courses are being developed, both by UCSD faculty as well as LANL staff who are also adjunct UCSD faculty members.
The final component of the educational program is the development of industry focused short courses taught jointly by LANL staff and UCSD faculty in the areas of structural health monitoring (SHM) and model validation and uncertainty. Most recently, the SHM course has been taught at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and Sandia National Laboratory. These short courses speed industry adoption of EI research and provide a metric for the relevance of EI research activities. The courses are completely self-sufficient and require no funding from LANL or LANS.
Currently, LANL is funding seven graduate student research projects that involve 11 faculty members and more than 15 UCSD graduate students from the structural engineering, mechanical and aerospace engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and computer science departments. With one exception, all the graduate students are US citizens. These projects are needed for the graduate students to complete the research component of their degree program. In an effort to enhance the recruiting aspect of this program, the student spend part of their summers in Los Alamos working with LANL staff that are collaborating on these projects. All projects have a direct tie to defense programs. Efforts are now underway to solicit research topics relevant to LANL programs so that the students have more direct ties to these programs. It is anticipated that such ties will enhance the subsequent recruitment of these students upon completion of their graduate degrees.
The research portfolio is now expanding as technical staff working on programmatic activities are beginning to collaborate with UCSD faculty and students on research topics of interest to these programs. In this regard, the EI provides a mechanism to expand the technical expertise addressing defense programs issues at LANL.
Additional peer review and strategic guidance will come through annual workshops, with a four-year cycle of recurring themes. Each year, the workshop will focus on one of the three fundamental technology areas (advanced sensing, signal processing and pattern recognition, and predictive modeling), with the fourth year’s workshop dedicated to the integration of these three technologies. With this repeating sequence, the evolution of the EI’s research in these respective technologies is tracked on a regular basis.
The first such workshop was held during the summer of 2005 and focused on energy harvesting. Energy harvesting is the process of converting ambient thermal or mechanical energy into electrical energy. Particular emphasis was placed on energy harvesting for small embedded sensing systems. The outcome of this workshop was a report that summarized the state of the technology in this field. Ideas exchanged in this workshop have also lead to a new research project with UCSD that will make use of robotic devices to deliver energy to embedded sensor networks. In July, 2006 a second workshop will focus on using concepts from nonlinear system identification to extract damage sensitive features from dynamic response measurement.
