Please join the UTC Institute for Advanced Systems Engineering in welcoming Dr. Hongyi Xu, who has recently joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering as an Assistant Professor. Prior to joining UConn, he worked at Ford in their Research and Advanced Engineering Department from 2014 to 2019. At Ford, he worked on many projects such as structure optimization for vehicle lightweighting, integrated computational material engineering of carbon fiber composites, lithium-ion battery impact safety, fuel cell membrane analysis, and the design of mesostructured systems for additive manufacturing. He received his B.S in Mechanical Engineering from Northeastern University in China, a M.S in Mechanical Engineering from Tsinghua University in China, and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Northwestern University in the US.
His current research focuses on developing design optimization for the analysis and design of heterogeneous microstructural materials. His research interests also include Design for Additive Manufacturing and data mining-enhanced multi-disciplinary optimization. He is currently working on two research projects. The first project is titled “Microstructure modeling for lithium-ion battery materials”, and the second is titled “Design and uncertainty quantification of additive manufactured mesostructured-structure system”. In the past 4 years, Dr. Xu has worked on several government and private industry sponsored projects, including two Department of Energy funded projects. The first project focused on Integrated computational materials engineering for the development of carbon fiber composites of lightweight vehicles. The second grant worked towards the development and validation of a simulation tool to predict the combined structural, electrical, electrochemical and thermal responses of automotive batteries.
In May of 2019, Dr. Xu will be traveling to Beijing to attend the World Congress of Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization. There, he will be presenting on “Mesostructure Optimization for Additive Manufacturing Based on Multi-fidelity Modeling and Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm”. In August of 2019, he will be attending the ASME 2019 International Design Engineering Technical Conference & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, where he will be presenting on “Multi-Fidelity Variance and Sensitivity Estimators and Adaptive High-Fidelity DOE for the Design of Mesostructure-Structure Systems”.
Dr. Xu has already had two papers published in the early months of 2019. He was one of the authors of a paper titled “Failure of chopped carbon fiber sheet molding compound (SMC) composites under uniaxial tensile loading: Computational prediction and experimental analysis”, which was published in Composites Part A: Applied Science and Manufacturing. He also was a co-author along with Liu Zhao on a paper titled “Control variate multi-fidelity estimators for the variance and sensitivity analysis of mesostructured-structure systems”, published in ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part B: Mechanical Engineering. Along with his papers already published, he also has two other papers that are currently under review. The first is titled “Modified multi-scale finite element method with the nodes linkage technique for predicting elastic property of metamaterials”, which in under review in Frontiers of Mechanical Engineering. The second paper is titled “Stochastic 3D Microstructure Reconstruction and Mechanical Modeling of Anisotropic Battery Separators”, under review in the Journal of Power Sources.