Friday 1 December 2017

Reliability in the engineering world and visiting Phimeca

Hi everyone!

Here we are again.

I told you that I was going to depart in a new experience very soon, and that was no lie.
Today I am finishing a visit I did to Phimeca, in France. Phimeca is an engineering company that is committed to bring the statistical know-how to the engineering world.

Well, and that is no easy task. Imagine that you ar a more classic structure stakeholder, and someone tells your... look lets use some of our mathematical knowldege to improve this structure operation and make it more safe. You would be like , okay...hum...interesting. Where do we start?

And then: Why don't we use some polynomial chaos expansion to replicate etc etc You are like: wwooow , halt! Polynomial chaos.... that doesn't sound very safe!!! (not the right name to captivate users out of research)

Or, well, lets evaluate the probability of failure. And you as structure stakeholder are like... whatt !?! This is going to fail?! Whats this!?!

Or, this is very conservative... and you as stakeholder are like: Great!! Will never fail! Go away.. no need...

You can see more or less how challenging this can be to implement in the real world in terms of awareness.
Nevertheless, introducing statistical know-how is much more powerfull than one can imagine and is really growing.
Easy, just you take a look  at all the standards and see the progressive increase in the need to assess uncertainty. It is no joke. Characterization of uncertainty really makes you robust to what's to come. If we now have huge amounts of data we can acess, why not to use it?

I think I told you before, but I used to put statistics on a second row of importance when comparing to structural analysis or fluid mechanics... But that was so wrong. Now, I am not leaving it ever. Give it a try too! You wont regret.

Well, why I came in contact with Phimeca is simple. They are high profile experts in the field of reliability and all its complex techniques. In my particular case, Kriging models, their knowledge was of great help and I can tell that I learned a lot.

But soon back home, to continue work there!

I know I said that I was going to write about thinking globally, that I always emphasise in my posts. But no inspiration today. Being busy really cuts of you capability to think more generally.

Well, I can tell you that I have been quite busy. I had a paper accepted in a Journal, finally. (so hard to get it)   And, I am working in some amazing stuff (I'm a pessimist by nature, so when I say its amazing, I think it really is... ).

2018 the final year of the PhD. Things are getting busy, so that I do not have time to divagate about the world problems....which is good and bad ! They say ignorance is bliss and that's no lie :)

But let's stay brainless-less, all of us. As soon as inspiration comes I'll come with the thinking global post (more criticism on top of cynism ...basically).

Nooo, it really is important to think globally. The lost of this sight is what brought us here today (in my opinion).

See you soon,
Rui

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