We are pleased to announce the 2021 Tribomechadynamics Research Challenge. In lieu of the traditional research camp that we organize annually, we felt that it was important to keep a collaborative activity going this summer even though the pandemic prevents us from getting together in person. The spirit of this challenge is to assess our community’s ability to make blind predictions on a novel, jointed structure. This challenge has been constructed by consulting both members of our community and industrial researchers to ensure that the resulting problem is both realistic and sufficiently interesting to challenge us all. Please see visit this link to download the detailed geometries, CAD files, and technical specifications of the challenge:
https://rice.box.com/v/ResearchChallenge2021
If you are interested in participating in the challenge, we ask that you notify Malte Krack, and cc both Matthew Brake and Christoph Schwingshackl of your intentions by no later than July 1st, 2021.
We will have a special session at the Tribomechadynamics Conference in August to discuss preliminary results and solution techniques.
The final submissions for the numerical modeling of the challenge will be due on September 30th, 2021.
All participants will be included as co-authors on a review paper that summarizes the results of this challenge along with perspectives for advancing the state-of-the-art, and outcomes from this work will be presented at IMAC 2022.
In the summer of 2022, as part of our annual research camp, we will fabricate several copies of this structure so that we can assess the quality of the blind predictions.
Lastly, we are also pleased to announce that the following PIs and their research teams have already agreed to participate:
- Matt Allen, University of Wisconsin/BYU
- Matthew Brake, Rice University
- Kiran D’Souza, The Ohio State University
- Nidhal Jamia, Swansea University
- Malte Krack, University of Stuttgart
- Rob Kuether, Sandia National Laboratories
- Christoph Schwingshackl, Imperial College London
- Kai Willner, Friedrich-Alexander University, Erlangen-Nurnberg
- Stefano Zucca, Politecnico di Torino
Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions.