Material and Engineering Sciences
Within the scope of research and development work along the value chain of materials, construction, simulation, production and the finished component and its operation, a substantial amount of structured and unstructured data is generated in each area (see Figure 1). This includes simulation data, construction data, machine and production logs as well as sensor data. The individual data records are characterized by strongly varying sizes (kilobytes to terabytes), heterogeneity and their chronological sequence along the value chain. In addition, new knowledge is generated within the scope of the activities, which is currently mostly available in isolated form in the context of the respective research activity.
On the basis of the presented initial situation, the development and application of methods of Big Data along the value chain in ScaDS will be advanced and the potential within it be raised. From the material and engineering sciences‘ point of view, the main objectives are:
- Enhanced material understanding,
- Reliable statements about the properties that are set (e.g. life, strength, deformation) as well as
- Derivation of new research needs
The following user projects have so far been intensively dealt with:
Multi-scale visualization
Based on a demonstrator vehicle (FiF of the SFB639), a browser-based software is developed for the cost- and material-efficient design of lightweight structures together with the professorship for Computer Graphics and Visualization, TU Dresden. This, for the first time, allows visualization of simulation data over several scales – from the filament, through roving to multilayer composites (see Figure 2). The software is platform-independent, so it can run on different operating systems and does not have to be installed. Thus, calculation results are presented quickly. You can find more information and a short film about the software on the related Blog post.
Finite-Elements-Software on the HPC-Clusters
For the High-Performance-Computing (HPC) clusters Taurus and Venus, user-friendly starter scripts are developed together with the ZIH, TU Dresden for the use of Finite-Element Programs Abaqus and LS-Dyna on HPC resources with a SLURM environment. The scripts mean a considerable cost reduction for the user, who only needs to specify basic parameters such as the number of nodes and CPUs to use. The computing environment on the HPC resource is automatically defined and managed. In future work, the parallelization is to be further increased as well as a graphical user interface to be created. The work is done by the Institute of Lightweight Engineering and Technology, Prof. Gude, TU Dresden.