Optimized structures in aerospace engineering are often thin-walled shell structures whose load-bearing capacity is limited by buckling phenomena.
Classical optimization-based design approaches rely on deterministic models, where the definition of model parameters based on incomplete or imprecise data can be challenging. Therefore, significant safety margins are often provided in design codes to account for the lack of knowledge.
This leads to increased weight, material consumption and costs. In reality, all data and parameters are subject to various uncertainty characteristics, such as natural variability (aleatory uncertainty) and the incompleteness or imprecise of data (epistemic uncertainty). In this work, the concept for polymorphic uncertainty quantification in buckling design optimization is presented.
The approach combines random, interval, and fuzzy variables into advanced uncertainty models that simultaneously account for both aleatory and epistemic uncertainty.
This enables more realistic designs and provides new perspectives beyond deterministic approaches in shell buckling. However, multi-objective design optimization under polymorphic uncertainty is computationally expensive. Therefore, surrogate modeling strategies are introduced. The proposed concept is demonstrated on different composite panel and cylindrical shell structures.
Speaker:
Dr. Marc Fina is a Chief Engineer at the Institute for Structural Analysis at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), and has been visiting the Department of Aerospace Science and Technology for four months, collaborating with Prof. Chiara Bisagni and her research group on the ERC NABUCCO project.
He received his PhD in structural mechanics and uncertainty quantification from the Department of Civil Engineering, Geo- and Environmental Sciences at KIT in 2020. In 2023, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). His research focuses on computational mechanics, polymorphic uncertainty quantification, buckling, surrogate modeling, and structural optimization. He has authored more than 50 publications, including journal articles, book chapters and monographs, conference proceedings, presentations, and invited talks. He has also organized several minisymposia at international conferences and serves as an Early Career Editorial Board Member of the ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part A: Civil Engineering.
Free admission, open to all members of the university community and the public, subject to availability.
08.05.2026