Seminars, Workshops and Conferences
May 19 - June 13, 2003: The Urban Management Centre (UMC) / Urban Environmental Management (UEM) Field of Study-AIT together with UN-ESCAP and the University of Wales-Cardiff are conducting the Second Training Course on 'Integrating Environmental Concerns Into Economic Decisions Making'.
This internet-based training course using the Virtual Policy Studio (VPS) tool aims:
- to provide participants with an introduction and a basic understanding of the concepts and issues related to Integrating Environmental Concerns into Economic decision making;
- to increase the understanding of the necessity and the difficulties in co-ordination among different agencies and stakeholders;
- to share experiences among participants in dealing with these issues related to integrating environmental concerns into economic decision-making.
Interested persons may contact the Urban Management Center at tel. ext. 5699 /5777
May 21, 2003: The Industrial Systems Engineering Program of the School of Advanced Technologies (SAT) will be presenting a seminar presentation on 'Intelligent Control of Laser-Based Manufacturing Processes and Systems'. The seminar presentation will be conducted by Dr. Pisut Koomsap, a candidate for a faculty position in the field of Design and Manufacturing Engineering, Industrial Systems Engineering, SAT, in room 219, Chalerm Prakiat Building at 9:00 a.m.
Interested persons are welcome.
Abstract
Lasers have been incorporated into manufacturing as an alternative
to conventional approaches to improve product quality as well as to reduce production cost. The success of lasers is partly due to their high beam quality that is a direct result of the condition of components involved in the lasing process. In practice, maintaining a high beam quality requires frequent, time consuming, intervention by highly skilled human operators for the typical inspection, servicing, and reassembling of laser components. These components, on the other hand, may be indirectly monitored to make those inspections fast and effective; consequently, unnecessary maintenance downtime is minimized and productivity of man and machine is improved.
The objective of this research was to unify process control,
condition monitoring, lifetime prediction, and condition-based maintenance scheduling for laser manufacturing systems consisting of one or more laser-based manufacturing processes. This unification is envisioned to allow manufacturers to safely and continuously operate their lasers without causing any damage to work-in-process parts and lasers themselves. Consequently, the manufacturers improve the productivity as well as avoid a long machine downtime.
Among laser-based processes, free-forming was selected to describe
the development of an intelligent control in this research. Free-forming
gives manufacturers a new direction of part producing by adding material
onto parts instead of the conventional method of subtracting material from parts. Parts are created layer-by-layer in this process; therefore, their
quality must be closely monitored and controlled. As a result, a real-time
process control is necessary to avoid the costs of continuing to produce
unacceptable products. A metamodel was developed to represent the process, used for controller design, instead of the previous complex, intensive computational, numerical model. A non-identifier-based adaptive process controller was then developed. A condition-based maintenance controller was developed to assist the process controller to quickly determine its laser condition. Based on the current laser condition: the maintenance controller estimates the remaining useful lifetime of its laser; recommends the appropriate laser power to the process controller; interacts with a maintenance crew agent to create a condition-based maintenance resource schedule.
The performance of this intelligent controller can be further improved in the future by using computing technology such as FPGAs. In some
cases for which models cannot be simplified, intensive computation is
anticipated in the complex system, so the computing technology will be
necessary to maintain the real-time control capability.
About the Speaker
Dr. Pisut Koomsap received the Bachelor of Engineering with a major in Industrial Engineering from Thammasat University in 1994. While attending Thammasat University, he served as a Chairman of the Engineering Student Committee during 1993.
After graduating from Thammasat University, he attended the
University of Louisville to pursue his Master Degree in Industrial
Engineering, and graduated in 1996. While attending the University of
Louisville, he was elected to membership in Alpha Pi Mu and Phi Kappa Phi.
In 1997, he attended the Pennsylvania State University to pursue
his doctoral degree in Industrial Engineering, and graduated in 2001. While attending the Pennsylvania State University, he also worked as a graduate research assistant at the Laser Processing Division, the Applied Research Laboratory (ARL).
After earning his Ph.D., he joined Northrop Grumman Component
Technologies, USA as a characterization engineer.
May 22, 2003: Seminar on 'Advanced 5-Axis CNC for Industry & Research' will be held at the Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology, Thammasat University, Rangsit Campus, 4th Floor, Room 413. The seminar will be conducted in English and participants are limited to approximately 50 only.
The organizing committee of the seminar are as follows: Dr. Stanislav Makhanov, Associate Professor, SIIT; Dr. Mud-Armeen Munlin, Assistant Professor, SIIT; Ir. Erik L. J. Bohez, Associate Professor, AIT and Than Lin, CIM-Laboratory Manager, AIT
Introduction
Nowadays there exists an obvious trend in the modern aerospace, car and ship building industries to replace 3-axis milling with 5 or even 6-axis machining. The well-established advantages of multi-axis milling such as the high material-removal rates and improved surface finish, allow for a substantial improvement in the accuracy of cutting operations as well as reduction of time required to manufacture complex shaped parts.
It is of paramount importance to develop software focusing on issues surrounding the efficient 5-axis implementations such as tool-path tracing, dynamic display of all moving elements and realistic solid modeling of the material removal.
In Thailand there exists a number of companies and research laboratories in which 5-axis milling has been actively used and analyzed. However, in spite of a variety of conferences and seminars on manufacturing there has been rarely an event specifically focused on 5-axis milling.
Therefore, the main goal of the seminar is to invite the Thai 5-axis machining community including the users, the software vendors and the researchers, to establish cooperation and exchange ideas.
Objectives:
- Introduce 5-axis CAD/CAM
- Discuss requirements of the industry
- Introduce 5-axis applications for Thai industry
- Present 5-axis research at AIT/SIIT
For further information please visit http://www.ise.ait.ac.th/cimlab/5axis_seminar.htm
or http://www.5axis-thai.com
May 23, 2003: Fast Simulation Model for Grid Scheduling Using Hypersim Seminar. The seminar, to be held at 1:30 p.m. in room 115, Chalerm Prakiat Building, is organized by the ISE Program and will be conducted by Khun Sugree Phatanapherom, Department of Computer Engineering, Kasetsart University.
Abstract
To develop grid scheduling algorithms, high performance simulator is necessary since grid is an uncontrollable and unrepeatable environment. A discrete event simulation library called HyperSim is designed as extensible building blocks for grid scheduling simulator. The event graph models for the grid simulation are proposed for different grid scheduling strategies. This model is well supported by HyperSim which yields a very high performance simulation. The experiments are conducted to compare HyperSim with other several simulators in terms of speed and scalability. The result shows a significant simulation speed improvement over many widely used simulators.
The seminar will focus on the architecture, the key strengths, and the examples on how to use the HyperSim object library for other types of simulation.
For more information, please email Dr. Voratas at voratas@ait.ac.th. To register please call Khun Eang at tel. 02-524-6601. Please note that seats are limited.
May 28, 2003: General Motors (GM) in ASEAN special seminar, co-organized by SOM, GM and the Asian Wall Street Journal, will be held at 1:30 p.m. in the School of Management Ampitheatre.
Mr. William S. Botwick, Executive Director of ASEAN, General Motors (GM) Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd. and President and Managing Director of General Motors (Thailand) Ltd. will conduct the seminar and will focus on GM and its branding strategy and automotive business in ASEAN.
Interested persons are welcome.
About the speaker:
Mr. William S. Botwick, President of GM Thailand and Chevrolet Sales Thailand, was appointed as Executive Director of ASEAN, General Motors Asia Pacific and President & Managing Director for General Motors Thailand on June 27, 2001. The GM ASEAN operation headquarters is located in Thailand.
In these roles, he oversees all areas of GM operations in the ASEAN, including the advanced manufacturing operations at the GM Thailand Assembly Center in Rayong Province, export and domestic sales, marketing, and after-sales service, as well as operations in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore
Mr. Botwick was named President of General Motors Thailand in August 1999. Prior to that assignment, he was a President Director of General Motors Indonesia from July 1995 until July 1999. While in Jakarta, he also served as the First Vice President of the American Chamber in Indonesia. From 1990-1995 he was Managing Director of General Motors Taiwan in Taipei and was also active in the American Chamber of Commerce, serving as its President from 1993-1994. At present, he serves as Vice President of American Chamber of Commerce in Thailand from beginning of 2001.
From 1984 - 1990, Mr. Botwick served as the Assistant General Counsel for General Motors Corporation in Detroit, Michigan. In 1982-1984, he served as the Assistant General Counsel for GM in Ruesselsheim, Germany. And from 1979-1982, he was the Director of Legal Affairs for Southern Europe for GM in Madrid, Spain. He began his career at General Motors in 1971 in the Legal Department in Detroit, Michigan.
Mr. Botwick was born on June 26, 1946, in Paterson, New Jersey, USA. He holds a Bachelor's degree in English literature from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, USA and a Law degree (J.D. Cum Laude) from the Boston University of Law, Massachusetts, USA.
May 29-30, 2003: Cluster Computing Technology Training Course. The training course, to be held in room 218, Chalerm Prakiat Building, is organized by AIT and Kasetsart University. The speakers will be Dr. Voratas Kachitvichyanukul, AIT and Dr. Putchong Uthayopas, Kasetsart University
Outline
The training course will introduce users to the concept of cluster computing and the relevant technology as well as how to use the cluster system to service their computing needs. The Optima cluster at AIT will be used as the resource for the training. The course will offer hand-on session so the users are encouraged to bring along existing programs that they might be interested in running on computer cluster.
Pre-requisite
Basic Unix skill (Unix commands, Unix editors such as VI or EMACS)
C or Fortran programming
Schedule
Day 1
Introduction to Parallel Computing
Access to the Optima cluster at AIT
Lab 1, Basic surviving skills
Basic MPI programming
Lab 2, MPI Hand-on session
Day 2
More on MPI programming
Lab 3, MPI Hand-on session
Parallel Genetic Algorithm via PGApack
Lab 4, Hand-on session
For more information, please email Dr. Voratas at voratas@ait.ac.th. To register please call Khun Eang at tel. 02-524-6601. Please note that seats are limited.
June 30, 2003: Seminar on 'Constitutive Modelling of Sand Based on the Concept of Hypoplasticity' will be held at 9:00 a.m. in room N240. The seminar will be conducted by Prof. Erich Bauer, Ao. Univ.-Prof., Dipl.-Ing. Dr. techn., Institute of General Mechanics, Graz University of Technology, Austria.
Abstract
A special class of a hypoplastic constitutive model is proposed to describe the mechanical properties of granular materials like sand. The concept of hypoplasticity differs fundamentally from the concept of elastoplasticity as no decomposition of the strain into reversible and irreversible parts is needed. Furthermore, the flow rule and the stress limit condition are not described by separate functions in hypoplasticity but they are included in the evolution equation for the state variables. With a unified description of the interaction between pressure level and density the model can be applied to a wider range of pressures and densities, using only one set of constitutive constants. Micro-properties of granular materials manifested during shear banding can be taken into account with an extension of the classical continuum approach to a micro-polar continuum. The advantage of the hypoplastic concept not only lies in the simple formulation of the constitutive equations and their implementation in a finite element code but also in an easy adaptation of the constitutive constants to experiments. It is shown by comparing the predictions with the experimental data on dense and loose sand that the hypoplastic constitutive model is capable of reproducing the essential properties of sand under drained and undrained conditions.