Search

In recent years, mathematical models have become an indispensable tool in the planning, evaluation, and implementation of public health interventions. Models must often provide detailed information for many levels of population stratification. Such detail comes at a price: in addition to the computational costs, the number of considered input parameters can be large, making effective study design difficult. To address these difficulties, we propose a novel technique to reduce the dimension of the model input space to simplify model-informed intervention planning. The method works by first applying a dimension reduction technique on the model output space. We then develop a method which allows us to map each reduced output to a corresponding vector in the input space, thereby reducing its dimension. We apply the method to the HIV Optimization and Prevention Economics (HOPE) model, to validate the approach and establish proof of concept.

Numerical simulations of a complete laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) additive manufacturing (AM) process are extremely challenging or even impossible to achieve without a radical model reduction of the complex physical phenomena occurring during the process. However, even when we adopt reduced model with simplified physics, the complex geometries of parts usually produced by LPBF AM processes make this kind of analysis computationally expensive. In fact, small geometrical features - which might be generated when the part is design following the principal of the so-called design for AM, for instance, by means of topology optimization procedures - often require complex conformal meshes. Immersed boundary methods seem to offer a valid alternative to deal with this kind of complexity. The two-level method lies within this family of numerical methods and presents a very flexible tool to deal with multi-scale problems. In this contribution, we apply the recently introduced two-level method to part-scale thermal analysis of LPBF manufactured components, first validating the proposed part-scale model with respect to experimental measurements from the literature and then applying the presented numerical framework to simulate a complete LPBF process of a topologically optimized structure, showing the capability of the method to easily deal with complex geometrical features.

Problems with localized nonhomogeneous material properties present well-known challenges for numerical simulations. In particular, such problems may feature large differences in length scales, causing difficulties with meshing and preconditioning. These difficulties are increased if the region of localized dynamics changes in time. Overlapping domain decomposition methods, which split the problem at the continuous level, show promise due to their ease of implementation and computational efficiency. Accordingly, the present work aims to further develop the mathematical theory of such methods at both the continuous and discrete levels. For the continuous formulation of the problem, we provide a full convergence analysis. For the discrete problem, we show how the described method may be interpreted as a Gauss-Seidel scheme or as a Neumann series approximation, establishing a convergence criterion in terms of the spectral radius of the system. We then provide a spectral scaling argument and provide numerical evidence for its justification.

Numerical simulation of the laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) procedure for additive manufacturing (AM) is difficult due to the presence of multiple scales in both time and space, ranging from the part scale (order of millimeters/seconds) to the powder scale (order of microns/milliseconds). This difficulty is compounded by the fact that the regions of small-scale behavior are not fixed, but change in time as the geometry is produced. While much work in recent years has been focused on resolving the problem of multiple scales in space, there has been less work done on multiscale approaches for the temporal discretization of LPBF problems. In the present contribution, we extend on a previously introduced two-level method in space by combining it with a multiscale time integration method. The unique transfer of information through the transmission conditions allows for interaction between the space and time scales while reducing computational costs. At the same time, all of the advantages of the two-level method in space (namely its geometrical flexibility and the ease in which one may deploy structured, uniform meshes) remain intact. Adopting the proposed multiscale time integration scheme, we observe a computational speed-up by a factor $\times 2.44$ compared to the same two-level approach with uniform time integration, when simulating a laser source traveling on a bare plate of nickel-based superalloy material following an alternating scan path of fifty laser tracks.

Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) is a powerful data-driven method used to extract spatio-temporal coherent structures that dictate a given dynamical system. The method consists of stacking collected temporal snapshots into a matrix and mapping the nonlinear dynamics using a linear operator. The standard procedure considers that snapshots possess the same dimensionality for all the observable data. However, this often does not occur in numerical simulations with adaptive mesh refinement/coarsening schemes (AMR/C). This paper proposes a strategy to enable DMD to extract features from observations with different mesh topologies and dimensions, such as those found in AMR/C simulations. For this purpose, the adaptive snapshots are projected onto the same reference function space, enabling the use of snapshot-based methods such as DMD. The present strategy is applied to challenging AMR/C simulations: a continuous diffusion-reaction epidemiological model for COVID-19, a density-driven gravity current simulation, and a bubble rising problem. We also evaluate the DMD efficiency to reconstruct the dynamics and some relevant quantities of interest. In particular, for the SEIRD model and the bubble rising problem, we evaluate DMD's ability to extrapolate in time (short-time future estimates).

In the wake of the 2020 COVID-19 epidemic, much work has been performed on the development of mathematical models for the simulation of the epidemic, and of disease models generally. Most works follow the susceptible-infected-removed (SIR) compartmental framework, modeling the epidemic with a system of ordinary differential equations. Alternative formulations using a partial differential equation (PDE) to incorporate both spatial and temporal resolution have also been introduced, with their numerical results showing potentially powerful descriptive and predictive capacity. In the present work, we introduce a new variation to such models by using delay differential equations (DDEs). The dynamics of many infectious diseases, including COVID-19, exhibit delays due to incubation periods and related phenomena. Accordingly, DDE models allow for a natural representation of the problem dynamics, in addition to offering advantages in terms of computational time and modeling, as they eliminate the need for additional, difficult-to-estimate, compartments (such as exposed individuals) to incorporate time delays. Here, we introduce a DDE epidemic model in both an ordinary- and partial differential equation framework. We present a series of mathematical results assessing the stability of the formulation. We then perform several numerical experiments, validating both the mathematical results and establishing model's ability to reproduce measured data on realistic problems.

We present an early version of a Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered-Deceased (SEIRD) mathematical model based on partial differential equations coupled with a heterogeneous diffusion model. The model describes the spatio-temporal spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, and aims to capture dynamics also based on human habits and geographical features. To test the model, we compare the outputs generated by a finite-element solver with measured data over the Italian region of Lombardy, which has been heavily impacted by this crisis between February and April 2020. Our results show a strong qualitative agreement between the simulated forecast of the spatio-temporal COVID-19 spread in Lombardy and epidemiological data collected at the municipality level. Additional simulations exploring alternative scenarios for the relaxation of lockdown restrictions suggest that reopening strategies should account for local population densities and the specific dynamics of the contagion. Thus, we argue that data-driven simulations of our model could ultimately inform health authorities to design effective pandemic-arresting measures and anticipate the geographical allocation of crucial medical resources., Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures

Problems with localized nonhomogeneous material properties arise frequently in many applications and are a well-known source of difficulty in numerical simulations. In certain applications (including additive manufacturing), the physics of the problem may be considerably more complicated in relatively small portions of the domain, requiring a significantly finer local mesh compared to elsewhere in the domain. This can make the use of a uniform mesh numerically unfeasible. While nonuniform meshes can be employed, they may be challenging to generate (particularly for regions with complex boundaries) and more difficult to precondition. The problem becomes even more prohibitive when the region requiring a finer-level mesh changes in time, requiring the introduction of refinement and derefinement techniques. To address the aforementioned challenges, we employ a technique related to the Fat boundary method as a possible alternative. We analyze the proposed methodology, from a mathematical point of view and validate our findings on two-dimensional numerical tests.