When
Thursday, January 29, 2026, 4:00 p.m.
Luis E. Ballesteros Martínez
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
University of Arizona
"Computational Design Optimization and Reliability Assessment of Systems Subjected to Random Vibrations"
AME Lecture Hall, Room S202
Zoom link
Abstract: Design for random vibrations is essential due to the impact of random forces on the safety and performance of engineering structures (e.g., payloads during launch). Although traditional random vibration analysis effectively provides results towards system reliability, it typically assumes fixed system parameters and considers uncertainty only in the applied loads. This simplification fails to account for a broader spectrum of uncertainties present in a system (e.g., material properties), which in many cases can have a greater influence on system behavior than the random excitation itself. To address this limitation, this work presents a reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) framework which incorporates both random vibrations and inherent structural uncertainties. The framework is based on machine learning techniques for regression and classification coupled with dedicated adaptive sampling schemes. The proposed approaches explicitly incorporate multiple sources of uncertainty and accommodate a large number of failure modes, including first-passage probability and fatigue, while limiting the computational effort to calculate the various probabilities of failure and converge to the optimum. Results are applied to a payload adapter and a high dimensional beam problem subjected to random excitation.
Bio: Luis E. Ballesteros Martínez is a PhD candidate in the Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Arizona. He is part of the Computational Optimal Design of Engineering Systems (CODES) Laboratory under the supervision of Prof. Samy Missoum. Luis holds BS and MS degrees in mechanical engineering from The University of Arizona and has more than ten years of experience working in the defense industry.