In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird eine Prozedur zur Ordnungsreduktion von Finite Elemente Modellen mikromechanischer Struktur mit elektrostatischem Wirkprinzip entwickelt und analysiert. Hintergrund der Ordnungsreduktion ist eine Koordinatentransformation von lokalen Finite Elemente Koordinaten in globale Koordinaten. Die globalen Koordinaten des reduzierten Modells werden durch einige wenige Formfunktionen beschrieben. Damit wird das Makromodell nicht mehr durch lokale Knotenverschiebungen beschrieben, sondern durch globale Formfunktionen, welche die gesamte Deformation der Struktur beeinflussen. Es wird gezeigt, dass Eigenvektoren der linearisierten mechanischen Struktur einfache und effiziente Formfunktionen darstellen. Weiterhin kann diese Methode für bestimmte Nichtlinearitäten und für verschiedene in Mikrosystemen auftretende Lasten angewendet werden. Das Ergebnis sind Makromodelle, die über Klemmen in Systemsimulatoren eingebunden werden können, die Genauigkeiten einer Finite Elemente Analyse erreichen und für Systemsimulationen typische Laufzeitverhalten besitzen.

<div>Excessive deformation and stress of skin following reconstructive surgery plays a crucial role in wound healing, often leading to complications. Yet, despite of this concern, surgeries are still planned and executed based on each surgeon's training and experience rather than quantitative engineering tools. The limitations of current treatment planning and execution stem in part from the difficulty in predicting the mechanical behavior of skin, challenges in directly measuring stress in the operating room, and inability to predict the long term adaptation of skin following reconstructive surgery. Computational modeling of soft tissue mechanics has emerged as an ideal candidate to determine stress contours over sizable skin regions in realistic situations. Virtual surgeries with computational mechanics tools will help surgeons explore different surgeries preoperatively, make prediction of stress contours, and eventually aid the surgeon in planning for optimal wound healing. While there has been significant progress on computational modeling of both reconstructive surgery and skin mechanical and mechanobiological behavior, there remain major gaps preventing computational mechanics to be widely used in the clinical setting. At the preoperative stage, better calibration of skin mechanical properties for individual patients based on minimally invasive mechanical tests is still needed. One of the key challenges in this task is that skin is not stress-free in vivo. In many applications requiring large skin flaps, skin is further grown with the tissue expansion technique. Thus, better understanding of skin growth and the resulting stress-free state is required. The other most significant challenge is dealing with the inherent variability of mechanical properties and biological response of biological systems. Skin properties and adaptation to mechanical cues changes with patient demographic, anatomical location, and from one individual to another. Thus, the precise model parameters can never be known exactly, even if some measurements are available. Therefore, rather than expecting to know the exact model describing a patient, a probabilistic approach is needed. To bridge the gaps, this dissertation aims to advance skin biomechanics and computational mechanics tools in order to make virtual surgery for clinical use a reality in the near future. In this spirit, the dissertation constitutes three parts: skin growth and its incompatibility, acquisition of patient-specific geometry and skin mechanical properties, and uncertainty analysis of virtual surgery scenarios.</div><div>Skin growth induced by tissue expansion has been widely used to gain extra skin before reconstructive surgery. Within continuum mechanics, growth can be described with the split of the deformation gradient akin to plasticity. We propose a probabilistic framework to do uncertainty analysis of growth and remodeling of skin in tissue expansion. Our approach relies on surrogate modeling through multi-fidelity Gaussian process regression. This work is being used calibrate the computational model against animal model data. Details of the animal model and the type of data obtained are also covered in the thesis. One important aspect of the growth and remodeling process is that it leads to residual stress. It is understood that this stress arises due to the nonhomogeneous growth deformation. In this dissertation we characterize the geometry of incompatibility of the growth field borrowing concepts originally developed in the study of crystal plasticity. We show that growth produces unique incompatibility fields that increase our understanding of the development of residual stress and the stress-free configuration of tissues. We pay particular attention to the case of skin growth in tissue expansion.</div><div>Patient-specific geometry and material properties are the focus on the second part of the thesis. Minimally invasive mechanical tests based on suction have been developed which can be used in vivo, but these tests offer only limited characterization of an individual's skin mechanics. Current methods have the following limitations: only isotropic behavior can be measured, the calibration problem is done with inverse finite element methods or simple analytical calculations which are inaccurate, the calibration yields a single deterministic set of parameters, and the process ignores any previous information about the mechanical properties that can be expected for a patient. To overcome these limitations, we recast the calibration problem in a Bayesian framework. To sample from the posterior distribution of the parameters for a patient given a suction test, the method relies on an inexpensive Gaussian process surrogate. For the patient-specific geometry, techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging or computer tomography scans can be used. Such approaches, however, require specialized equipment and set up and are not affordable in many scenarios. We propose to use multi-view stereo (MVS) to capture patient-specific geometry.</div><div>The last part of the dissertation focuses on uncertainty analysis of the reconstructive procedure itself. To achieve uncertainty analysis in the clinical setting we propose to create surrogate and reduced order models, especially principal component analysis and Gaussian process regression. We first show the characterization of stress profiles under uncertainty for the three most common flap designs. For these examples we deal with idealized geometries. The probabilistic surrogates enable not only tasks such as fast prediction and uncertainty quantification, but also optimization. Based on a global sensitivity analysis we show that the direction of anisotropy of skin with respect to the flap geometry is the most important parameter controlled by the surgeon, and we show hot to optimize the flap in this idealized setting. We conclude with the application of the probabilistic surrogates to perform uncertainty analysis in patient-specific geometries. In summary, this dissertation focuses on some of the fundamental challenges that needed to be addressed to make virtual surgery models ready for clinical use. We anticipate that our results will continue to shape the way computational models continue to be incorporated in reconstructive surgery plans.</div>

Dans un moteur à propergol solide, des instabilités thermoacoustiques auto-entretenues, induites par le couplage de la dynamique de la combustion des gouttes d’aluminium, libérées par la combustion du propergol, avec le champ acoustique peuvent induire des oscillations de pression.L’analyse menée tout au long de ce manuscrit repose sur un ensemble d’hypothèses simplificatrices: (i) la réponse de la combustion de gouttes d’aluminium aux perturbations acoustiques est contrôlée par l’écoulement local autour de la goutte, (ii) le processus de combustion peut être supposé quasi stationnaire pour la gamme de fréquences et les amplitudes acoustiques étudiées et (iii) la combustion de l’aluminium est brusquement arrêtée lorsque le diamètre de la goutte d’aluminium diminue en dessous d’un diamètre résiduel.L’instabilité thermoacoustique est étudiée au moyen de simulations numériques de l’écoulement dans un moteur générique et d’analyses théoriques. Le diamètre résiduel des gouttes d’aluminium après la combustion, l’amplitude de la perturbation acoustique et la durée de la combustion des gouttes d’aluminium figurent parmi les principaux paramètres modifiant l’instabilité. En outre, trois comportements de réponse de la combustion à l’acoustique sont identifiés : un comportement linéaire pour les faibles niveaux de pression acoustique puis un comportement quadratique (faiblement non-linéaire) et enfin un comportement fortement non-linéaire quand l’amplitude des oscillations augmente.Ensuite, deux aspects importants de la réponse des gouttes d’aluminium sont identifiés. Ils sont associés aux oscillations de la durée du temps de combustion des gouttes, identifiables à la frontière du nuage de gouttes, et aux fluctuations du taux d’évaporation contrôlées par la convection de l’écoulement gazeux autour de chaque goutte. Tenant compte de ces dynamiques,des expressions analytiques sont obtenues permettant de reproduire avec précision les résultats numériques des simulations de l’écoulement. Quatre nombres sans dimension qui régissent la dynamique de ces instabilités sont également identifiés. Inspiré de l’analyse théorique précédente, un modèle numérique d’ordre réduit faiblement non linéaire est finalement développé pour prédire des cycles limites. / In a solid rocket motor, self-sustained thermo-acoustic instabilities, induced by the coupling of the combustion dynamics of aluminum droplets released by the burning propellant with the acoustic field can induce pressure oscillations.The analysis conducted throughout this manuscript relies thus on a set of simplifying hypothesis by assuming (i) that the response of the combustion of aluminum droplets to acoustic perturbations is controlled by the oscillating drag exerted by the local flow around the droplet, (ii) that this unsteady combustion process can be assumed quasi-steady for the range of frequencies and acoustic amplitudes studied and (iii) that aluminum combustion is abruptly quenched when the aluminum droplet diameter falls below a residual diameter.The thermo-acoustic instability is studied first by numerical flow simulations in a generic solid rocket motor and theoretical analyses. The post-combustion residual diameter of the aluminum particles, the amplitude of acoustic perturbation and the lifetime of the burning aluminum droplets are among the main parameters altering the instability. Also, three combustion response behaviors to acoustics are identified : a linear behavior for small acoustic pressure levels followed by a quadratic behavior then a highly non-linear behavior when the pressure amplitude increases in the motor chamber. Moreover, two important features of the response of aluminum droplets are identified. They are associated to oscillations of the droplet lifetime at the boundary of the droplet cloud and to fluctuations of the droplet evaporation rate, controlled by convection. The dynamics of the droplets highly depends on gas and droplet velocity fields and on droplet diameter. Taking these features into account, yields analytical expressions that allow to reproduce with accuracy the numerical results from the flow simulations. Four dimension less numbers are then identified. They govern the dynamics of these instabilities. Inspired from the previous theoretical analysis, a weakly nonlinear low-order numerical model is finally developed to predict limit cycles.

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This dissertation introduces a general, predictive and cost-efficient reduced-order modeling (ROM) technique for characterization of flame response under acoustic modulation. The model is built upon the kinematic flame model–G-equation to describe the flame topology and dynamics, and the novelties of the ROM lie in i) a procedure to create the compatible base flow that can reproduce the correct flame geometry and ii) the use of a physically-consistent acoustic modulation field for the characterization of flame response. This ROM addresses the significant limitations of the classical kinematic model, which is only applicable to simple flame configurations and relies on ad-hoc models for the modulation field. The ROM is validated by considering the acoustically-excited premixed methane/air flames in conical and M-shape configurations. To test the model availability to practical burners, a confined flame configuration is also employed for model evaluation. Furthermore, to investigate the generality of the ROM to the burner flame, the performance of the ROM with respect to the V-shape and the swirled V-shape is investigated. The model accuracy is evaluated concerning flame geometrical features and flame describing function, and assessed by comparing the ROM results with both experimental measurements and direct- numerical-simulation results. It is found that the flame describing/transfer functions predicted by the ROM compare well with reference data, and are more accurate than those obtained from the conventional kinematic model built upon heuristically-presumed modulation fields.

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The first objective of this Dissertation is to present a methodology to calculate analytically the mode shapes and corresponding natural frequencies and determine critical buckling loads of mechanically coupled microbeam resonators with a focus on micromechanical filters. The second objective is to adopt a nonlinear approach to build a reduced-order model and obtain closed-form expressions for the response of the filter to a primary resonance. The third objective is to investigate the feasibility of employing subharmonic excitation to build bandpass filters consisting of either two sets of two beams coupled mechanically or two sets of clamped-clamped beams. Throughout this Dissertation, we treat filters as distributed-parameter systems. In the first part of the Dissertation, we demonstrate the methodology by considering a mechanical filter composed of two beams coupled by a weak beam. We solve a boundary-value problem (BVP) composed of five equations and twenty boundary conditions for the natural frequencies and mode shapes. We reduce the problem to a set of three linear homogeneous algebraic equations for three constants and the frequencies in order to obtain a deeper insight into the relation between the design parameters and the performance metrics. In an approach similar to the vibration problem, we solve the buckling problem to study the effect of the residual stress on the static stability of the structure. To achieve the second objective, we develop a reduced-order model for the filter by writing the Lagrangian and applying the Galerkin procedure using its analytically calculated linear global mode shapes as basis functions. The resulting model accounts for the geometric and electric nonlinearities and the coupling between them. Using the method of multiple scales, we obtain closed-form expressions for the deflection and the electric current in the case of one-to-one internal and primary resonances. The closed-form solution shows that there are three possible operating ranges, depending on the DC voltage. For low DC voltages, the effective nonlinearity is positive and the filter behavior is hardening, whereas for large DC voltages, the effective nonlinearity is negative and the filter behavior is softening. We found that, when mismatched DC voltages are applied to the primary resonators, the first mode is localized in the softer resonator and the second mode is localized in the stiffer resonator. We note that the excitation amplitude can be increased without worrying about the appearance of multivaluedness when operating the filter in the near-linear range. The upper bound in this case is the occurrence of the dynamic pull-in instability. In the softening and hardening operating ranges, the adverse effects of the multi-valued response, such as hysteresis and jumps, limit the range of the input signal. To achieve the third objective, we propose a filtration technique based on subharmonic resonance excitation to attain bandpass filters with ideal stopband rejection and sharp rolloff. The filtration mechanism depends on tuning two oscillators such that one operates in the softening range and the other operates in the hardening range. Hardware and logic schemes are necessary to realize the proposed filter. We derive a reduced-order model using a methodology similar to that used in the primary excitation case, but with all necessary changes to account for the subharmonic resonance of order one-half. We observe that some manipulations are essential for a structure of two beams coupled by a weak spring to be suitable for filtration. To avoid these complications, we use a pair of single clamped-clamped beams to achieve our goal. Using a model derived by attacking directly the distributed-parameters problem, we suggest design guidelines to select beams that are potential candidates for building a bandpass filter. We demonstrate the proposed mechanism using an example. / Ph. D.