Modal analysis of 4-story structure

The 4-story Aluminum structure pictured was modeled in CAD and a linear eigenvalue modal analysis was performed to extract the natural frequencies and mode shapes. Bayesian updating was performed to minimize the error between the FEA-predicted frequencies and the experimentally measured frequencies.

The novel aspect of this work was in the methodology for modeling the bolted connections. Details can be found in the conference paper, published in the proceedings of SEM IMAC XLI.

Mechanical hand CAD project

This CAD model was based on an artistic rendition of a mechanical hand.

The two bearings were imported from McMaster-Carr, but all other parts were created in Solidworks with a combination of solid and surface modeling. A design table was used to generate each of the finger segments as configurations of the same model.

Nonlinear resistor network simulation software

The goal of this project was to create a neuromorphic circuit capable of being trained as an artificial neural network. The chips were comprised of Nickel nanostrands suspended in epoxy, and header pins served as inputs and outputs. The strategy was to weaken undesirable connections, leaving behind the desired input-output mapping.

My contribution to the project was software for simulating nonlinear random resistor networks. The program populates a volume with nanostrands (modeled optionally as points or as 1D fibers), creates a connectivity graph based on the distances between neighboring fibers, and solves Kirchoff's laws for the steady-state voltage at every node, using the graph Laplacian matrix.

The program utilized PyTorch for GPU acceleration and was capable of simulating tens of thousands of non-Ohmic resistors.