The Newest Center Scales Up
Rensselaer to tackle daunting challenges in multiscale science and engineering

Multiscale science and engineering has hit a wall. Rensselaer has the resources to break through it.

That has led to the creation of the Institute’s newest center. Nearly 60 Rensselaer faculty have expressed their eagerness to participate in the Multiscale Science and Engineering Center (MSEC), which opened October 31, 2006. They bring with them a vast array of specialties—from multiscale mathematics to nanocomposites to flow control for aircraft and earthquake engineering—all of which could benefit profoundly from advances in the field.
 
“Rensselaer has the breadth and depth to explore this field effectively,” noted MSEC director Jacob Fish, Rensselaer’s Rosalind and John J. Redfern Jr. ’33 Chaired Professor in Engineering. “The faculty here are involved in multiscale theory, experiments, and computations; more important, as a group we can cover a variety of interdisciplinary areas that none of us alone would be able to address.”

Systems approach needed

They will need their expertise to overcome a daunting challenge. While multiscale science and engineering has generated tremendous interest (“many universities are hiring aggressively in this field,” said Fish), progress to date has come only through its application in very specific areas—leaving few components that can apply to other research. What’s needed is a systems approach that will take advantage of the practically unlimited design space at the fine scales.

Three factors contribute to the challenge. “First, there is a lack of a systematic mathematical foundation with well-defined error bounds, which makes multiscale predictions often unreliable and even erroneous,” Fish explained. “Second, there is a lack of knowledge about how to reduce the tremendous design space of fine-scale variables to a manageable size that works on the system (product or patient) level. Third, we do not understand how to calibrate the design space at multiple scales to the experimental data.”

Rensselaer’s multiscale response

The plan for MSEC is to resolve these challenges—and, in the process, create an entirely new field of study. “We can develop this field into a discipline that will spur the exploration of the interactions between materials and systems up to the system scale,” Fish explained. “This will ultimately result in superior products and processes in nanotechnology, biotechnology, electronics, energy, and other areas.”

Research projects in many of those areas are already in full swing at Rensselaer, and they will stand to benefit greatly from advances generated at MSEC. As Fish said, “The success of our initiatives is tightly linked with the maturity of multiscale engineering and science.”

MSEC’s advantages may position it ideally to pursue status as a government- or industry-sponsored center. Ultimately, the goal is much larger. “We are concerned with transforming multiscale technologies into a useful design system that will revolutionize engineering practice and scientific discovery,” noted Fish. “With the strengths we bring to the endeavor, I believe Rensselaer is in the driver’s seat in terms of integrating the components that have evolved independently so far.”