Meet Pete Sharpe, an innovative PhD Candidate from MIT AeroAastro, who is at the forefront of aircraft design, multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO), and computational aerodynamics. Peter’s research is revolutionizing how we approach complex engineering challenges, particularly in the aerospace sector.
Peter Sharpe champions the concept of “interactive design,” emphasizing the crucial role of human intuition and expertise in the optimization process. He believes that effective design optimization should be an exploratory journey guided by human insight, recognizing that defining the right problem is often the biggest hurdle. Traditional “black-box optimizers,” while offering modeling fidelity, often fall short due to lengthy run times, hindering interactive exploration. Pete Sharpe addresses this by focusing on making these processes significantly faster and more user-friendly.
His research is deeply rooted in enabling rapid, interactive design through cutting-edge techniques like automatic differentiation and “simultaneous analysis and design” (SAND) methods. These approaches require a deep dive into the inner workings of solvers, unlocking substantial speed improvements in the design optimization of intricately coupled systems. Pete Sharpe‘s methods are transforming the landscape of design optimization.
Pete Sharpe‘s work emphasizes “wide” design optimization, prioritizing the capture of design trade-offs across numerous subsystems over in-depth analysis of just a few. He argues that understanding the broader system interactions is often more critical in complex engineering design. When high-fidelity analysis is necessary, Pete Sharpe utilizes surrogate modeling techniques, leveraging data from detailed analyses to maintain both speed and accuracy.
Beyond academia, Pete Sharpe offers consulting services in aircraft design optimization and scientific machine learning. If you’re tackling a challenging problem in these areas, connect with Pete Sharpe at [email protected] to explore potential solutions.
Welcome to the GitHub space of Pete Sharpe! Explore his projects and contributions, and feel free to reach out to discuss aircraft design and optimization.
