The Shape of an Inflatable Membrane
Staff - Faculty of Informatics
Start date: 18 September 2012
End date: 19 September 2012
The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Frank Baginski
DATE: Tuesday, September 18th, 2012
PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room A21, Red building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 16:30
ABSTRACT:
Thin light-weight inflatable membranes are an important class of aerospace structures that includes high- altitude large scientific balloons, aerodynamic decelerators, and large aperture deployable antennas. When a membrane is very thin, it is unable to support compressive stresses and, in response, wrinkles or forms internal folds of excess material with large regions of self-contact. This behavior, as well as issues related to scaling of large structures, complicates the challenge of developing reliable analytical tools for modeling and prediction. In this talk, we will explore related questions using numerical models and compare our predictions with observations from experimental data.
BIO:
Frank Baginski is Professor of Mathematics at The George Washington University. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1985. Professor Baginski has been a visiting scholar at the Center for Geometry Analysis Numerics \& Graphics at the University of Massachusetts and the Center for Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations, Institute for Applied Mathematics, University of Bonn. He was a 1992 NASA Summer Faculty Fellow at the NASA Balloon Program Office, Wallops Island, Virginia and a 2011 NASA Glenn Summer Faculty Fellow at the Antenna and Optical System Branch, Cleveland, Ohio. His research interests include nonlinear partial differential equations with applications to cell membranes, minimal surfaces, elastic shells, large scientific balloons, large aperture inflatable antennas and inflatable aerodynamic decelerators.
HOST: Prof. Rolf Krause
