Assistant Professor X. Shelly Zhang has been named Faculty Fellow by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for 2019-2020, joining six other faculty members from across campus. The NCSA Faculty Fellowship is a competitive program for faculty and researchers at Illinois which provides side funding for new collaborations that include NCSA staff as integral contributors to the project.
Zhang’s project is titled High-Performance, Multi-objective, and Multi-physics Design Optimization of Next-Generation, Patient-specific Implant Scaffold at Scale:
With recent advances in tissue engineering, the design and fabrication of implant scaffolds have become emerging areas of research, as the traditional implants fail to fulfill required functionalities for specific patients. While topology optimization offers a promising method for scaffold design, existing studies have limited capabilities of addressing multiple design scenarios and fine control of the porosities to achieve highest performances. To address these challenges, the proposed research aims to create a high-performance, multi-physics, and multi-objective topology optimization framework for the design of next-generation patient-specific scaffolds implant scaffold with enhanced multifunctionality. The proposed formulation addresses both mechanical and mass transport design requirements using multi-objective formulations and simultaneously controls the location, size, and shape of porosities through local constraints. To successfully realize the high complexity of the scaffold structures, the proposed research requires large problem size (hundreds of millions of degrees of freedom) and 3D multi-physics simulations, which must rely on massively parallel supercomputers. The PI will work closely with NCSA to develop highly scalable algorithms and high-performance computational frameworks for efficient optimization and to utilize the large-scale supercomputers in order to achieve ultra-high-resolution designs.
Zhang’s NCSA collaborator is Erman Guleryuz.
Zhang joined the CEE at Illinois structures faculty in January 2019. She earned a B.S. (2012) and M.S. (2014) degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Ph.D. from Georgia Tech (2018). Zhang's research interests are in the general areas of topology optimization, stochastic programming, machine learning, multi-scale metamaterials, additive manufacturing, 3D/4D printing and uncertainty quantification.