Kurt Maute - US grants

This project is concerned with the advancing the fundamental knowledge of life-cycle reliability analysis (LCA) and design optimization with a particular emphasis on engineering microsystems. The goal is to create a rigorous computational framework for studying appropriate formulations of LCA. This framework is a synthesis of (a) reliability analysis and optimization algorithms, (b) life-cycle cost models accounting for the time-variant non-deterministic system response, (c) high-fidelity numerical simulation and sensitivity analysis, and (d) coupled reduced order models. The framework will be embedded into a design methodology that allows the maximization of the life-cycle benefits of microsystems while accounting for uncertainties and reliability constraints. Cost models will be developed that integrate manufacturing and system design requirements into the formulation of the device level optimization problem through cost-tolerance and cost-reliability relations.

The outcome of this work will advance the fundamental discovery and understanding of the life-cycle design of non-deterministic microsystems, in particular of systems whose complexity results from the interaction of multiple phenomena. This research will increase the awareness of the importance of accounting for uncertainties in engineering design and will provide a formal, mathematical approach for incorporating probabilistic life-cycle design concepts. The research activities will be integrated into undergraduate and graduate level courses. An Internet-based version of the computational framework will be developed, which will allow students to discover the importance of uncertainties and the concept of life-cycle reliability in the design process of microsystems.

Mimicking natural organisms to solve engineering design problems has triggered revolutionary developments in bio-medical and material sciences. In these instances the natural and the engineering design problems are most often closely related, and a direct transfer of design concepts was possible. However, to fully
exploit natural design concepts and to apply biomimetic design approaches to a broad range of engineering design problems, a formal design framework based on abstraction and synthesis is needed to facilitate the fundamental understanding of biomimetic design.

This career-development plan is motivated by the challenges of extending biomimetics into a formal design approach. The proposed work will provide a formal design framework, will allow the systematic study of a broad range of natural systems, and will foster the rapid integration of biologically inspired solutions
into engineering design. The research projects will focus on the development and the application of unique optimization tools for the biomimetic design of adaptive, shape-controlled, macro and micro systems.
Controlling the shape is an essential capability of most adaptive systems, such as optical micro-electromechanical switches and next generation aircraft equipped with morphing wings. Design oriented courses, enhanced by a new educational design optimization software platform, and vertically integrated design teams will promote the skills of future design engineers. Outreach activities will promote engineering design disciplines among K-12 students and underrepresented groups. The research and
educational activities will be enhanced by comprehensive collaborations with physiologists, design groups at national laboratories, and software companies.

The research objective of this award is the development of a novel framework for the design of a broad range of nanoengineered materials and devices. As macroscopic modeling and analysis methods are inaccurate, and existing nanoscale approaches are inadequate for design purposes, a new modeling approach based on kinetic theory will be explored. Computational analysis methods will be developed for predicting the performance of the nanostructures and their sensitivity with respect to design and uncertainty parameters. A stochastic formulation of the analysis and design problems will account for uncertainties due to imperfections of manufacturing techniques. A level-set based topology optimization approach will facilitate finding non-intuitive design solutions. To provide appropriate focus, this project will examine submicron thermal transport design problems. Enhanced by industry collaboration, two important technological drivers will be considered: (a) the design of novel thermoelectric materials for energy harvesting and conversion, and (b) the design of optimal thermal management systems for next-generation 3-D microchips. The technological significance of these drivers, coupled with the fact that nanoscale thermal transport differs significantly from macroscopic conduction, renders these problems excellent test beds.

If successful, the results of this research project will increase the ability to design, manipulate, and realize materials and devices at nanometer scales leading to advances across a wide spectrum of technologies. The proposed design framework will foster a push-pull interaction between scientists and engineers that will enable the rapid transfer of new scientific insight into novel engineering designs and products. In particular, the proposed design approach and computational tools will enable the development of novel energy-harvesting materials and optimal thermal management concepts for next-generation microchips. Introducing the proposed design methods into the curriculum will enhance the education of a new generation of engineers who will be able to translate fundamental scientific understanding into engineering design at nanoscale.

The objective of this EFRI-SEED project is to study a "living wall" concept that acquires its original idea from biomimicry of the body's thermo-regulation systems (i.e., respiratory and circulatory systems) that can efficiently adapt to changes in the surrounding environment via sophisticated heat transfer processes and metabolic adjustments. The novel living wall system embeds two sets of optimized microvascular fluid channel (MVFC) networks and a distributed phase change medium (PCM) into an innovative polymer-based wall unit to allow autonomous movement of air and liquid and charge/discharge of PCM in response to real-time indoor and outdoor temperature variations so as to dynamically regulate the thermal behavior of the building envelope and the entire dwelling. While natural convection drives air through a porous holding material, novel hydrogels with tailored temperature sensitivity will be developed to move liquid in the wall thickness direction. By combining hydrogels with different temperature sensitivities the responsiveness will be increased and the amount of free liquid reduced to negligible level. Mathematical models and computational design approaches will be developed to optimize the layout of the holding material, the MVFCs and PCM components. A prototype of the living wall will be fabricated and studied under a series of thermal and structural loading scenarios. The performance of the entire living wall system under dynamic indoor and outdoor conditions will be systematically investigated through multi-physics simulations and novel design approaches to seamlessly integrate the living wall concept into current and future building constructions.

This project will expedite the research for net-zero-energy buildings with significant reduction of heating and cooling energy needs via smart building envelope designs. Based on preliminary results, the new living wall concept is expected to reduce 80-95% of the current building energy needs for offsetting adverse heat losses/gains through conventional walls and for providing extra ventilation and electrical lighting due to tighter and opaque wall structures. The success of this research will greatly stimulate the application of biomimetic design principles for developing sustainable energy efficient engineering designs and reshape the current building design and construction philosophy and practice. The proposed research will ultimately lead to the development of a brand new interdisciplinary academic program in Bio-Architectural Science and Engineering (BASE). This will include the development of a horizontally and vertically integrated cross-disciplinary research and education program for pre-college, undergraduate and graduate students from broad fields of interest, as well as developing a rich, multi-faceted outreach program. The PIs will team up with the NSF-funded Colorado Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate and College of Engineering's BOLD Center to attract and integrate undergraduate and graduate students from underrepresented groups into this research project. A formal assessment plan will be implemented to measure the success of the education and outreach activities.

The FY 2010 EFRI-SEED Topic that supports this project was sponsored by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorates for Engineering (ENG), Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) and Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE), and Computer & Information Science and Engineering in collaboration with the US Department of Energy (DOE) and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The research objective of this award is to create an approach that enables integration of manufacturing and design processes of nano-structured materials into a seamless optimization framework. This approach will allow considering systematically the interdependency of manufacturing and design parameters, and rigorously treating uncertainty due to material properties and manufacturing imperfections. Conventional strategies that loosely couple design and manufacturing become inadequate when the size of material features and devices approaches nano-meter scales. This deficiency typically results in lengthy product development cycles, low yield, high manufacturing costs, and unreliable designs. The optimization framework here will tightly couple design and optimization processes. To handle the increased complexity of the interconnected design and manufacturing problem, this research will explore new strategies for rigorously decomposing the coupled problem into simpler, tractable sub-problems. The development of the optimization framework will be driven by the challenges of designing and manufacturing high-energy-density electrodes for re-chargeable battery cells.

This research effort will create a formal approach for the fast and efficient insertion of novel nano-engineered materials and devices into a broad range of technologies. Through the application of the new optimization framework to the design of high-capacity battery cells, this project will directly contribute to advancing energy storage technology, which plays a crucial role in the quest for sustainable energy. Additionally, this project will provide a unique opportunity for two graduate students and up to six undergraduate students who will receive a rigorous training at the interface between design optimization, numerical modeling, and uncertainty quantification. Upon graduation, these students will have the knowledge and skills to bridge the gaps between design and manufacturing, and to tackle fundamental issues currently hampering the development of a broad class of nano-enabled technologies. Results of the research will be broadly disseminated for maximum impact.

The research objective of this Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (EFRI) Origami Design for the Integration of Self-assembling Systems for Engineering Innovation (ODISSEI) award is to create a holistic approach, named photo-origami, to transform a flat polymer sheet into a mechanically robust 3D structure via a sequence of light-activated folding and deformation steps. This new manufacturing approach will be achieved by integrating shape memory polymers, photo-responsive compliant material, and optical waveguides into a smart canvas to enable sequentially folding. The research will develop methods that are applicable to several interdisciplinary fields including active materials, photomechanics, photochemistry, and optics, and thus can be exploited in a wide array of applications. The research approach starts from the establishment of the basic components and the corresponding mechanistic understanding, progresses to the development of multiphysical nonlinear design theory, and achieves the final goal of creating photo origami. Deliverables include a suite of active materials and their activation methods, multiphysical modeling and design tools, demonstration and validation, documentation of research results, engineering student education, engineering research experience for high school students, and dissemination the research achievements to the general public.

If successful, the results of this research will enable fundamentally new approaches to manufacture materials and devices with extraordinary functionalities. Example applications include new sparse materials with low weight but high strength or anisotropic properties, deep 3D MEMs with integrated electronic, RF or optical circuit elements. Manufacturing approaches from this research will offer the advantage of a flat initial state where functional devices can be easily placed and a final complicated 3D structure. Graduate and undergraduate students will benefit from a rigorous training at the interface between material science, mechanics, optics, and design optimization through involvement in the research. The research will also be tightly integrated into STEM education and outreach activities by partnering with the local school district to bring public awareness and to inspire K-12 student?s interest in STEM.

This project is supported in part by funds from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

CBET-1246854
PI: Y. C. Lee (Univ. of Colorado)

Atomic layer deposition (ALD) and molecular layer deposition (MLD) are important thin film deposition processes based on sequential, self-limiting surface reactions. ALD and MLD can deposit conformal and ultrathin inorganic and organic films with atomic/molecular layer control. ALD was recognized as the transformative technology when ALD was added to the semiconductor roadmap over ten years ago. ALD and MLD have the potential to make an even more significant impact if their throughput and cost can be improved using roll-to-roll (R2R) processes. For example, ALD and MLD could be used to fabricate high quality gas diffusion barrier on polymers for organic light emitting diodes and thin film photovoltaics. ALD could also be employed to coat the electrodes of Li ion batteries to improve their capacity stability and greatly extend their lifetime. Laboratory results have already confirmed the excellent performance of ALD barriers and coatings. Transitioning these laboratory results to the market requires a rapid and cost-effective method to perform ALD and MLD on polymer or foil webs.

This project will build an R2R ALD/MLD testbed with process control for web speeds of up to 30 m/min. To accomplish this challenging goal, computational fluid dynamics modeling will be performed to understand ALD/MLD and support the systematic design of novel gas source heads for ALD/MLD on both flat and porous substrates. The gas source heads will be integrated with a R2R web handling machine and this new apparatus will be optimized using studies of in situ monitoring of thickness versus processing parameters. Reduced order models will be studied and applied to achieve optimal performance. In addition, new methodologies will be developed for web handling such as the placement of the gas source head in the region of web wrap on a roller. The interdisciplinary team will also work with ALD NanoSolutions, a local startup company. ALD NanoSolutions is currently developing an R2R ALD testbed to coat flat polymer web substrates. The team will also collaborate with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Sandia Labs, Formosa Plastic and Kent Displays for potential scale-up manufacturing.

R2R ALD/MLD nano-manufacturing will facilitate the commercialization of ALD/MLD for a large number of applications and help to restore U.S. manufacturing competitiveness. This research will also educate and train undergraduate and graduate students to perform original research in scalable nano-manufacturing. A new section on ALD/MLD-enabled systems will be introduced into a first-year mechanical engineering projects course. These projects will develop designs that will be used in the K-12 outreach programs. R2R manufacturing teaching modules will be also introduced into existing undergraduate and graduate courses. The results of this research will also be widely disseminated at various scientific meetings and through a project web site.

The research objective of this grant is to elucidate the fundamental mechanisms that are responsible for contact, adhesion, and friction interactions between micro-patterned surfaces and soft fluid-coated substrates. The goal is to understand the generation of tractions; its dependence of key design, environmental, and operational parameters; and its impact on the mechanical response of the substrate. A multi-scale modeling framework will be used to capture the interplay of large macro- and micro-scale deformation phenomena during the roll-over of a treaded wheel over a soft wet substrate, in dependence of material, geometric, and operational parameters. The mechanical behavior of tread and substrate will be described by large deformation theories and appropriate constitutive models. The tight integration of modeling and experiments will provide novel insight into the contact mechanics of soft, wet materials, in particular into the microscopic phenomena for generating friction and the interplay of macro- and micro-scale mechanics for generating traction.

If successful, this research will facilitate the discovery of new types of patterned architectures and concepts and establish a crucial body of knowledge needed for the design of in vivo robotic devices that can reduce patient trauma and expand robotic surgery. The proposed educational program will introduce students at all levels, including those from typically underrepresented groups, to the excitement inherent in research conducted at the intersection of micro-fabrication, biomechanics, and robotics in general, and to the promise inherent in the world of surgical robotics specifically. The proposed educational activities will be enhanced by our access to the University of Colorado?s Award-winning Integrated Teaching and Learning Laboratory.

The NSF Sustainable Energy pathways (SEP) Program, under the umbrella of the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability (SEES) initiative, will support the research program of Prof. Se-Hee Lee and co-workers at the University of Colorado at Boulder to develop a new generation of energy storage materials and devices. The team of investigators includes researchers with expertise in materials science, battery engineering and environmental and economic assessment at an early stage in battery research and development. Energy storage materials play a crucial role for finding a sustainable solution to transportation via electric vehicles. Today's approaches for developing such materials do not account of the complex tradeoffs between various performance criteria, currently used to design batteries, and sustainability goals, including life cycle costs and economic factors. In this project, the team of investigators will adopt concepts from multi-disciplinary optimization for coordinating the sustainability and material design problems. A novel multi-scale modeling framework will be established to predict the performance of 3-D structured electrode architectures and cell layouts. The model development will be supported by fundamental research on the thermodynamic and kinetics characteristics of solid state lithium pyrite (SS-LP) batteries, using advanced experimental techniques. Life-cycle analysis and environmental impact studies will be carried out to assess the sustainability of the proposed battery technology with respect to manufacturing and use.

Through coupling research discoveries with ongoing and new educational activities, students at all levels (K-12 through graduate, including students from typically underrepresented groups) will be exposed to the excitement of renewable energy in general and the world of energy storage material systems for electric vehicles in particular. Interdisciplinary, tightly integrated research will provide an environment for educating a new cadre of engineers and economists, who will not only be experts in their disciplinary fields but also understand the broader context of sustainable energy and thus are equipped to lead the design of a new sustainable energy future.

The proposed research will create a new paradigm to design energy storage materials bridging the gap between materials research and the environmental and economic impact of technologies in which these materials play a crucial role. The proposed research specifically focuses on SS-LP batteries, a new battery material system with extraordinary properties. The SS-LP battery development holds the promise of a major breakthrough in reaching a market beyond the small-capacity vehicles of urban drivers.

Folding and unfolding materials to create structures with novel shape and functionality has been recognized as a promising design concept for engineering systems at and across a broad range of length scales. This workshop will bring together a diverse group of international experts to discuss and explore challenges and opportunities in the emerging field of origami design. The workshop will be held on May 14, 2013, in Orlando, Florida, directly subsequent to the 10th World Congress on Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization (WCSMO-10). WCSMO-10 is considered the primary conference series in topology optimization, an approach that is particularly promising for origami design. In addition to internationally renowned leaders in computational design and topology optimization, researchers of current NSF EFRI ODISSEI projects will be invited.

The focus of the workshop will be on the fundamental principles of origami design. The main goals are to (a) identify the intrinsic challenges of designing structures that fold and unfold at various and across length scales, and (b) explore opportunities for design optimization, in particular topology optimization, to systematically design (unfolding) structures. The workshop will result in a comprehensive understanding of the current capabilities of topology optimization for origami design and the new challenges origami design poses for the design optimization community. The workshop will educate materials, device, and structural design researchers on systematic approaches to origami design, and it will pose novel, exciting problems to the topology optimization community. The workshop will bring together both senior researchers and their graduate students from around the globe, thus planting the seed for new domestic and international collaborations.

This award supports research in establishing a design methodology for 3D printed active composites. In these materials constituents interact such that an object made of the composite alters its shape upon an external stimulus, such as a temperature change. With a 3D printing process composites with complex internal layouts can be manufactured. The composite is printed as an initially flat sheet which takes on a 3D shape after thermo-mechanical treatment, and deforms into yet another 3D shape upon activation. 3D printed active composites open the door for new solutions to a broad class of engineering problems in healthcare, biomedical, aerospace, and automotive applications. For example, active composites would enable novel soft surgical robots whose initial shape is suited for insertion into the human body and which are then deployed into a desired shape to assist a surgical procedure. Currently there exist no tools for systematically designing these composites. This research involves several disciplines, including mathematics, mechanics, and computer science. This setting will provide a stimulating environment for students who will participate in this project and broaden participation of underrepresented groups in research. Outreach activities will bring the excitement of 3D printing into K-12 classrooms.

The active composite consists of glassy polymers embedded in an elastomeric matrix. The temperature dependence of the mechanical properties of glassy polymers creates a shape polymer effect. The properties of the polymer phases depend on complex processing conditions during 3D printing. The constitutive response will be described as temperature-dependent and anisotropic nonlinear viscoelastic. Experiments on the thermomechanical response will support the constitutive model development. The design methodology will integrate the nonlinear material models into a multi-material topology optimization approach. The location and shape of glassy polymer inclusions as well as parameters defining the programming loads will be optimized simultaneously. Consequently, the composite assumes a set of target shapes due to thermo-mechanical treatment and upon activation. The geometry of the material interfaces will be described by a level set method. The response of the printed composite objects will be predicted by a generalized formulation of the extended finite element method. To account for manufacturing constraints, such as limitations in printer resolution, constraints for controlling the minimum feature size in 3D material layouts will be developed. The optimization problem will be solved by a gradient-based algorithm, computing the gradients of objective and design constrains by the adjoint method. Experiments will be employed for validation of the design methodology.

Structural composites are materials consisting of two or more constituent materials with different properties, that when combined, exhibit unique mechanical properties. The individual constituents can be chosen and arranged to achieve desirable properties, such as high stiffness and low density. In a conventional composite, however, these properties are constant and cannot be changed without permanently changing the structure or composition of the material. This award supports fundamental research to enable the analysis and design of a new class of composite materials that are tunable on-demand and on-the-fly. These tunable materials will feature internal networks of flow channels that allow active tuning of the density, elastic constants, and damping properties. The tunable composites enable fundamentally new strategies for the control of vibration and acoustics across a wide range of applications. This research combines several disciplines including elastodynamics, constitutive modeling, dynamic homogenization, fluid-structure interaction, band structure calculations, and design optimization. The multi-disciplinary nature of the research will provide a stimulating setting for students who will participate in this project and broaden participation of underrepresented groups in research. Outreach activities will attract K-12 students to the design of engineered materials with tunable properties and the underlying concepts pertaining to wave motion and mechanics of materials.

The specific objectives of this project are to establish a rigorous dynamic homogenization theory for the tunable composites. The theory will account for the effects of dissipation on the composite properties. This theory will be used towards the analysis and design of fluidic metamaterials consisting of periodic arrays of resonators intertwined with a built-in network of flow channels with varying fluid composition and flow conditions. A topology optimization scheme will be established to maximize the real-time performance of the emerging fluid-structure material system. Building upon Bloch theory for harmonic wave propagation, the research on dynamic homogenization will establish a methodology for obtaining frequency-dependent effective properties for the density, damping, and elasticity tensors. A computational framework based on a finite-element time-domain scheme will be created for computing the band structure of the coupled fluid-structure system. A gradient-driven topology optimization methodology using level sets and the extended finite element method will be explored to optimally arrange fluid and solid phases. The resulting tunable metamaterial represents a major transformation to what constitutes a multi-functional composite that is intrinsically dynamic, adaptive, and energy absorbing, providing unprecedented new opportunities for sound and vibration control.

Parallel computers have grown so powerful that they are now able to solve extremely complex fluid flow or structures problems in seconds. Unfortunately, it may take a researcher many hours or even days to set up a complex problem before it can be solved. Furthermore it may take hours or often weeks to extract insight from the volume of data the simulation produces, if using standard techniques. For discovery and design questions, where the next variant of the problem requires a change to the problem definition, these delays disrupt the flow of experimentation and the associated intuition and learning about how the change in the problem definition relates to a change in the solution. To address this issue, a paradigm shift, referred to here as "immersive simulation", is planned to enable new approaches to problem definition editing that allow practitioners to interact with the simulations (visual model iteration) in a manner where they can dynamically experience the influence of parameter variations from a single, live, and ongoing simulation. Examples include a surgeon virtually altering the shape of a bypass graft on one computer monitor and then virtually observing the change in the blood flow patterns not only within the bypass but throughout the vascular system. Likewise, an engineer altering the shape of a virtual car to see if the flow pattern improves or worsens. These applied research examples have parallels in fundamental research where live insight into the flow physics of unsteady, turbulent flows and their sensitivity to live parameter changes will be made available to researchers for the first time. Visually connecting the solution change to the visually iterated geometry and/or parameter change will enable a new age of intuition-driven discovery and design. This paradigm shift will also be incorporated into foundational undergraduate and graduate courses to enable deeper, experiential-based learning.

The central goal of this project is to advance state-of-the-art tools into generic components that, when integrated, will make the following capabilities available to any partial differential equation solver: 1) live, reconfigurable visualization of ongoing simulations, 2) live, reconfigurable problem definition to allow the dynamic solution insight to guide the choice of key problem parameters, 3) real-time parameter sensitivity feedback, 4) adaptive simulation control to account for discretization errors and geometry changes, and 5) integration and demonstration of reliable, immersive simulation. The first communities that these software components will be developed with include cardiovascular flow and aerodynamic flow control. They have already articulated a need for software to more rapidly explore the performance of their systems under a broad parameter space with intuitive and quantitative parameter sensitivity. This software will enable not only design (applied research e.g., exploring bypass vs. stent type and placement for a particular patient's diseased vasculature or flow control actuator placement), but also discovery (fundamental research e.g., explore physics of flow response to discover completely new surgical procedures and flow control processes and devices). This twofold and complementary software application will have a similar impact on education, where foundational courses will use the integrated software modules to create immersive simulations that build intuition about flow physics, and then reinforce that learning in an applied nature in capstone design courses. While the ideas will be prototyped and proven within the field of fluid dynamics, they will be developed generally, with sustainable software engineering, for easy adoption by other fields that make use of simulation. The successful development, integration, and demonstration of these tools at scale will transform massively parallel simulation from a series of I/O-intensive steps to live, reconfigurable discovery using carefully designed interfaces that blaze the trail for all simulation.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Unfitted finite element methods allow for the simulation of physical systems that are difficult if not impossible to simulate using classical finite element methods requiring body-fitted meshes. For instance, unfitted finite element methods can be directly applied to the simulation of physical systems exhibiting a change of domain topology, such as the movement of blood cells through a human capillary or the flow of blood past the heart valves between the four main chambers of the human heart. Unfitted finite element methods also streamline the construction of computational design optimization technologies that optimize the geometry and material layout of an engineered system based on prescribed performance metrics. However, the computer implementation of an unfitted finite element method remains a challenging and time-consuming task even for domain experts. The overarching objective of this project is to construct a novel software library, EXHUME (EXtraction for High-order Unfitted finite element MEthods), to enable the use of classical finite element codes for unfitted finite element analysis. EXHUME will empower a large community of scientists and engineers to employ unfitted finite element methods in their own work, allowing them to carry out biomedical, materials science, and geophysical simulations that have been too expensive or too unstable to realize using classical finite element methods. EXHUME will also improve the fidelity of design optimizations being performed in academia, national laboratories, and industry on a near daily basis.

Unfitted finite element methods simplify the finite element solution of PDEs (Partial Differential Equations) on complex and/or deforming domain geometries by relaxing the requirement that the finite element approximation space be defined on a body-fitted mesh whose elements satisfy restrictive shape and connectivity constraints. Early unfitted finite element methods exhibited low-order convergence rates, but recent progress has led to high-order methods. The key ingredient to success of a high-order unfitted finite element method is accurate numerical integration over cut cells (i.e, unfitted elements cut by domain boundaries). EXHUME uses the concept of extraction to express numerical integration over cut cells in terms of basic operations already implemented in typical finite element codes, an integration mesh, and extraction operators expressing unfitted finite element basis functions in terms of canonical shape functions. EXHUME generates integration meshes and extraction operators outside of the confines of a particular finite element code so it may be paired with existing codes with little implementation effort. A key goal of the project is demonstration of EXHUME by connecting it to existing research codes and the popular FEniCS toolchain for finite element analysis. An effort parallel to software development explores accuracy versus efficiency trade-offs associated with 1) approximations made during extraction and 2) novel numerical quadrature schemes for cut cells. The breadth of EXHUME's technical impact is ensured by several factors: 1) the ubiquity of PDEs across nearly all disciplines of science and engineering, 2) the library's interoperability with existing finite element codes, and 3) the generic nature of the EXHUME+FEniCS demonstrative example, which can be applied to arbitrary systems of PDEs. By simplifying the setup of PDE-based computational models, EXHUME+FEniCS enables classroom demonstrations simulating complicated physical scenarios without letting the technical details of numerical methods distract from the scientific principles being taught.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.