Minimum-mass panels under probabilistic aeroelastic flutter constraints

Minimum-mass panels under probabilistic aeroelastic flutter constraints

Aeroelastic flutter is a dangerous failure mode, and aircraft structural components are designed under a deterministic flutter margin. Meeting this safety factor may result in overly-conservative structures, however, an alternative approach incorporates uncertainties into the computational models, and imposes a maximum allowable flutter probability during the optimization process. This techniqu...

Aeroelastic flutter produces hummingbird feather songs.

During courtship flights, males of some hummingbird species produce diverse sounds with tail feathers of varying shapes. We show that these sounds are produced by air flowing past a feather, causing it to aeroelastically flutter and generate flutter-induced sound. Scanning laser doppler vibrometery and high-speed video of individual feathers of different sizes and shapes in a wind tunnel reveal...

Optimization Under Probabilistic Envelope Constraints

Chance constraints are an important modeling tool in stochastic optimization, providing probabilistic guarantees that a solution “succeeds” in satisfying a given constraint. While they control the probability of “success,” they provide no control whatsoever in the event of a “failure.” That is, they do not distinguish between a slight overor under-shoot of the bounds, and more catastrophic viol...

Supporting Online Material for Aeroelastic Flutter Produces Hummingbird Feather Songs

Stochastic Combinatorial Optimization under Probabilistic Constraints

In this paper, we present approximation algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems under probabilistic constraints. Specifically, we focus on stochastic variants of two important combinatorial optimization problems: the k-center problem and the set cover problem, with uncertainty characterized by a probability distribution over set of points or elements to be covered. We consider these ...