Department of Computer Science
Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, and ANU Supercomputer Facility
Australian National University
Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia
Henry.Garnder@anu.edu.au

The PUPPY Case Study in Computational Engineering
http://anusf.anu.edu.au/hpclab/compeng.html
http://www.mca.com.au/puppy/
http://www.strand.aust.com/

In late 1995 the ANU Supercomputer Facility and the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at the Australian National University established a program to introduce the teaching of Computational Science and Engineering into the curriculum. The pedagogical aims of this program are to teach students to use modern computing resources to solve "real life" problems in science and engineering; to encourage an experimental approach to the use of computer modelling packages; to incorporate computer modelling as part of the optimisation of the engineering design process; to develop skills in the visualisation, analysis and presentation of data and in the writing of reports; and to emphasise the basic physical, mathematical and numerical principles behind professional simulation software.

One of the new courses, introduced into the final year of the Interdisciplinary Systems Engineering degree, is a Computational Engineering elective which uses professional software packages to address problem themes in structural analysis and computational fluid dynamics. It is the first time that the students have been exposed to this sort of computational modelling and one of the aims of the course is to equip graduates with "exit skills" to intelligently use numerical software packages in a future professional career.

One of the case study themes is the analysis of a stainless steel supporting shell for a major piece of modern art: the PUPPY flower sculpture by New York based artist Jeff Koons which was erected at the Sydney summer festival in 1995-96. The shell was made from stainless steel plates which were bent and welded into modules between 3 and 5 meters long and one meter high. Additional vertical and horizontal ribs (also of stainless steel plate) were welded to the shell to form flower boxes of approximately one square metre in area. Adjoining modules were bolted together in the horizontal and vertical directions. The total weight of the shell was 12 metric tonnes and the combined weight (with wet soil) about 80 tonnes. The "fur" was simulated by a skin of 3 and 4 mm thick stainless steel mesh which was carefully designed to constrain the soil to the contours of the PUPPY sculpture. There was an irrigation system and the entire sculpture was planted out with more than 65,000 flowers. The consulting engineers involved in the original project (DW Knox and Partners of Sydney) told us how they performed their computer analysis by approximating the shell as a heterogeneous beam structure. Our task was to refine this using more advanced software and greater computing power.