Academic lecture by College of Information Science & Technology

Topic：Recent Advances in the Computational Modeling and Simulation of Airplane Crashes
Date：Nov 23，2018
Time：10：00am
Venue：Room224，Nanhai Building
Reporter：Prof. Goong Chen

Introduction：Thankfully, airplane crashes do not happen too frequently for any cause. Nevertheless, it is important to be able to understand what has happened in case of an airplane crash. In this talk, we examine two cases:(1) The laptop bombing case ofDaalloAirlines Flight 159 in February 2016, near Mogadishu, Somalia;(2) The shot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in Ukraine, 2015.We first examine five important characteristics of bombing:(i) The bet-out of metal onto itself;(ii)The jaggedness along the rim of the fracture;(iii) The feathering and sharpening along the rim of the debris;(iv)The puncturing and micro-cratering of the surface;(v)The blackening of the damage surface. We develop computational mechanics for the modeling and supercomputing to evaluate how much it can capture the above five characteristics and, therefore, provide a forensics study for the Daallo Airlines Flight 159 and Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 airplane crash cases. The talk is easy to understand, and several video animations will be shown to help understand what has happened in such cases.

Introduction to  reporter：Goong Chen was born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan in 1950. He received his BSc (Math) from the National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan in 1972 and PhD (Math) from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1977. He has taught at the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (1977–78), and the Pennsylvania State University at University Park (1978–1987). Since 1987, he has been Professor of Mathematics and Aerospace Engineering, and (since 2000) a member of the Institute for Quantum Studies, at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. He has also held visiting positions at INRIA in Rocquencourt, France, Centre de Recherche Mathematiques of the Université de Montréal, the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby, Denmark, the National University of Singapore, and National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan. He has research interests in many areas of applied and computational mathematics: control theory for partial differential equations (PDEs), boundary element methods and numerical solutions of PDEs, engineering mechanics, chaotic dynamics, quantum computation, chemical physics and quantum mechanics. He has written over one hundred and fifty papers, seven advanced texts/monographs, and co-edited four books. He is an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, and the Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier/Academic Press’ Mathematics in Science and Engineering Book Series. He has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Chapman & Hall/CRC Press Applied Mathematics and Nonlinear Science Series (2002-2011), and as Associate Editor for several other editorial boards, including the SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, the International Journal on Quantum Information, Physica Scripta, and the Electronic Journal of Differential Equations. He is also a co-holder of a U.S. Patent on certain quantum circuit design for quantum computing. He has memberships in the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).He is presently working on projects related to computational mechanics for contemporary problems. The article on the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 published as the cover story in the April 2015 issue of the Notices of The American Mathematical Society (AMS) with G. Chen as the lead author was named by the AMS as one in Top Math Stories in the Media - 2015.