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Brian Dennis
Work Address
Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
Box 19018Woolf Hall, Room 316C
University of Texas at Arlington
Arlington, TX 76019-0018
Tel: 817-272-7379
Fax: 817-272-5010



 

Education

  • Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering,    The Pennsylvania State University          8/’97-12/’00 
    Thesis title: Simulation and Optimization of Electro-Magneto-Hydrodynamic Flows 
  • M.S. in Aerospace Engineering,    The Pennsylvania State University            8/’95-7/’97
    Thesis title: A Software Package for Thermoelastic Optimization with Application to the Design of Internally Cooled Turbine Blades
  • B.S. in Aerospace Engineering,    The Pennsylvania State University             8/’91-5/’95 
Skills
  • languages
          English: native speaker
          Japanese: basic reading/writing/conversation
  • proficient in C/C++, FORTRAN, JAVA, BASIC, knowledge of all major operating systems including UNIX (Linux, Irix, Solaris), DOS, WinNT, CMS/VMS. Programming experience with MPI, sockets (BSD/Winsock), MFC, OpenGL, bash/sh shells, Xlib/ Xt/ Motif, HTML, LaTeX. Experience using NASTRAN, PATRAN3, GAMBIT, FLUENT, MATLAB, Mathematica, CVS
  • extensive experience in implementing and applying numerical methods including finite element method (FEM), finite volume method (FVM), finite difference method (FDM), and boundary element method (BEM) for fluid mechanics, heat transfer, solid mechanics, and electromagnetics to engineering problems using Beowulf clusters.
  • experience implementing and applying constrained numerical optimization methods including genetic/evolutionary algorithms and adaptive response surface methods for single and multiple objective engineering design problems in large-scale Beowulf cluster environments.

Positions
  • Visiting Associate Professor

    6/’03 to 7/04

    The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan 
        Performed research and education in the Dept. of Engineered Environment, Institute for Environmental Studies. Taught an undergraduate level course entitled "Genetic Algorithm Programming". Supervised and assisted graduate students with their research in computational mechanics with applications to environmental problems. Advised students specifically in the areas of FEM, parallel computing, and optimization software development. Successfully applied an inverse FEM code to the detection of junction temperature in a 3-D ball grid array (BGA) electronic package. Developed the Distributed Optimization Network Toolkit (DONT) for enabling parallel optimization on UNIX/Windows computers over the Internet. The DONT system was successfully used to optimize a transonic wing using a 3-D Navier-Stokes solver and 3 parallel computers spread across the world. Developed software library for visualizing 2-D/3-D unsteady flows on hybrid unstructured grids using particle tracing. Developed an unsteady 2-D electromagnetohydrodynamics code using FEM and currently applying it to the design of a novel micropump with no moving parts. The same code was modified by adding an Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) formulation and used it to simulate a flapping airfoil with a moving unstructured grid. Designed, built, and tuned a low cost 96 Opteron processor parallel computer with gigabit Ethernet networking for Florida International University Dept. of Mechanical Engineering. Currently developing 3-D parallel solver for electromagnetics and incompressible fluid flow using finite element method.
  • Research Associate

    7/’01 to 4/'03

    The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan 
        Worked under Prof. Shinobu Yoshimura (yoshi@q.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp) as part of the JSPS ADVENTURE project (7/'01-6/'02) and Frontier Simulation Software for Industrial Science (FSIS) project (7/'02-3/'03). Tasks involved development of design optimization software for use with parallel computers and large scale finite element models (more than one million degrees of freedom). The software was implemented and tested on various parallel computers including a PC cluster. A parallel genetic algorithm and a parallel response surface method were incorporated into the design system. The software was applied to the thermoelastic design optimization of cooling passages in a 3-D turbine vane and a 3-D turbine rotor using 54 Pentium III processors.
  • Senior Research Associate/ Computer Laboratory Manager

    8/’99 to 6/'01

    The University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX 
        Managed MAIDO computing laboratory at University of Texas at Arlington for Prof. George S. Dulikravich (phone: (817) 272-7376). Tasks involved hardware troubleshooting and system administration for IRIX, WINNT, and Linux based workstations. UNIX system administrator for the MAIDO lab parallel computer Grendel. Also responsible for overall MAIDO lab system and network security. Built a commodity component based 32 processor distributed memory parallel computer, HighPACE, for the Acoustics Program at Penn State University. Parallelized a multi-objective constrained optimization code developed by Prof. I. N. Egorov using MPI.  Optimized shapes of 2-D turbomachinery airfoil cascades and 3-D stator blade dihedral angle distributions.  Developed a new software package for optimization of cooling protocols during freezing of organs for transplant surgery. Developed 2-D magnetohydrodynamic codes with heat transfer prediction capability based on least-squares finite element method (LSFEM). Developed 2-D magnetohydrodynamic flow analysis code and optimized distribution of magnetic field that creates desired types of flow-fields. Developed 2-D electromagnetohydrodynamic flow analysis code based on p-version (spectral element) LSFEM. Also worked on sparse solvers for p-version FEM matrices, including developing a multilevel iterative method. Developed 3-D finite element code for the inverse detection of unknown boundary conditions for thermoelastic problems. Developed a 3-D finite element code for the simulation of unsteady heat conduction in realistic model of a human head and neck.
  • Graduate Research Assistant 

    8/’95 to 5/’00

    The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
       Worked under the supervision of Prof. George S. Dulikravich.Wrote a finite element program in C++ for steady/unsteady thermal/elastic analysis in 3-D and in 2-D.Work involved development of an object-oriented linear algebra library and several iterativesolvers (CG, CGS, BiCGSTAB) and preconditioners (ILU, Jacobi, multigrid) and adaptive unstructured mesh refinement and various codes for efficiently manipulating unstructured meshes.Currently modifying the program for running in a distributed parallelprocessing environment and also adding an optimization routine based on a hybrid genetic algorithm and sequential quadratic programming. Developed a finite element solver for steady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations on hybrid triangular/quadrilateralmeshes. Wrote an interactive Win32 program for the generation of 3-D turbine blades with internal coolant passages.Developed and implemented an algorithm for the inverse detection of unknown boundary conditions for elliptic equations using FEM. Wrote software for the design of turbine airfoils using genetic algorithms, sequential quadratic programming and an unstructured finite volume Navier-Stokes solver.Developed a MPI based parallel genetic algorithm based general optimization program. Designed, built, and maintained low cost 32 processor parallel computer, Grendel, which was based on commodity PC components. 
  • Summer Intern 

    summer '99

    Sandia National Laboratory, Albuquerque, NM
       Worked in the Applied Mathematics branch with Dr. Mike Eldred (phone: (505) 844-6479).The work involved software development in C++ of portions of the DAKOTA object-oriented general optimization package. Developed and implemented a newclass hierarchy for function approximations and design and analysis of computer experiments (DACE) methods that allowed for greater code reuse. Also developed GUI front-end using Motif/Xt/Xlib to display optimization results in real-time. 
  • Summer Intern 

    summer '98

    Sandia National Laboratory, Albuquerque, NM
       Worked in the Structural Dynamics branch with Dr. Mike Eldred (phone: (505) 844-6479).The work involved adding function approximation codes (feed-forward neural networks, multivariate regression, and quadratic response surface) and routines for 2-D and 3-D graphics to the DAKOTA object-oriented general optimization package. 
  • Summer Intern 

    summer '97

    Sandia National Laboratory, Albuquerque, NM
       Worked in the Structural Dynamics branch with Dr. Garth Reese (phone: (505) 845-8640).The work involved adding output routines to the SALINAS code (sparse eigen solver). 
  • Engineering Intern 

    summer '96

    Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Co., East Hartford, CT
       Worked in the Aeromechanics branch with Dr. Gary Hilbert (phone: (860) 565-5422).The work involved designing piezo-ceramic modules used for the passive damping of fan blades.NASTRAN and PATRAN3 were used extensively to perform both static and dynamic structural FEM analysis of blades with the modules attached.Special C codes were written to aid in the placement of a designed module onto the existing unstructured fan blade mesh. 
  • Summer Intern 

    summer '95

    Pratt & Ohio Aerospace Institute, Cleveland, OH
       Worked in the Multidisciplinary Design and Optimization department at NASA Lewis Research Center with Dr. John Lytle (phone:(216) 433-3213) writing a 3-D visualization program in C and FORTRAN using the Visual3 graphics library.The program was customized for turbomachinery applications.Some work was done on implementing a parallel version of the code using PVM for running on a cluster of thirty RS6000 workstations. 
Honors
  • Tau Beta Pi (honor society in engineering) 
  • Lambda Sigma Honor Society
  • Sigma Gamma Tau (honor society in aerospace engineering)
  • Golden Key Honor Society
Professional Activities
  • Member of the editorial board for the journal Inverse Problems in Science and Engineering, 1/2004-1/2005
  • Member of the INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE of the INVERSE PROBLEMS, DESIGN AND OPTIMIZATION (IPDO) SYMPOSIUM, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, March 17-19, 2004.
  • Chairman of the session J2, International Symposium of Inverse Problems in Engineering 2003(ISIP2003), Nagano, Japan, 2003.
  • Co-Chairman of the mini-symposium Computational Treatment of Inverse Problems in Mechanics, Fifth World Congress on Computational Mechanics (WCCM V), Vienna, Austria, 2002.
  • Chairman of the poster session Methodical Topics III, Fifth World Congress on Computational Mechanics (WCCM V), Vienna, Austria, 2002.
  • Co-Chairman of the Session Inverse Problems in Solid Mechanics, International Symposium of Inverse Problems in Engineering 2001(ISIP2001), Nagano, Japan, 2001.
  • Member of American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) 
  • Member of American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)