DRF Lunchtime Clinic - Prof. Fehmi Cirak

The DRF Lunchtime Clinic is delighted to welcome Professor Fehmi Cirak, Professor of Computational Mechanics and Head of the Computational Structural Mechanics Laboratory (CSMLab) at the University of Cambridge, who will join us to talk about Statistical Finite Elements for Self-Sensing Infrastructure.

About the talk

How can we reliably infer the health of a complex infrastructure asset using only a handful of sparse and noisy measurements? Achieving this requires a rigorous mathematical way to incorporate measurement data from engineering systems into established finite element models. This seminar introduces the statistical finite element method (statFEM) as a foundational paradigm for developing digital twins of self-sensing structures. Within this Bayesian probabilistic framework, uncertainties in the data, the mathematical model, and its finite-element discretisation are all accounted for. Ultimately, statFEM transforms established finite element models into self-aware digital twins that support reliable, data-driven decision-making throughout the lifecycle of an engineering asset. We demonstrate the implementation of statFEM for real-world assets, showing how sparse observation data can be used to infer the overall state of a structure, including not-measured quantities of interest and at non-instrumented locations.

Bio

Fehmi Cirak is a Professor of Computational Mechanics and the Head of the Computational Structural Mechanics Laboratory (CSMLab) in Cambridge. Prof. Cirak's research focuses on statistical finite elements for digital twinning, Bayesian inference, isogeometric analysis, and, more recently, quantum computing. He joined Cambridge in March 2006, after five years as a Senior Scientist at the Center for Advanced Computing Research at the California Institute of Technology. He has a PhD in Computational Mechanics from the University of Stuttgart. Amongst others, Prof Cirak was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow in Aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology and a Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.