Smart work for the space shuttle

A major input to America's high-profile NASA space shuttle programme has been achieved in collaboration with the University's Department of Industrial Technology. "We have contributed to the development of intelligent real-time diagnostic systems for the animal holding facility on board the shuttle," said Dr Chakib Kara-Zaitri, Deputy Director of the Disaster Prevention and Limitation Research Unit.

A long-standing relationship has been developed with NASA, the organisation createdin 1985 to research problems associated with flight systems both inside and outside the Earth's atmosphere. A link-up was established in 1994 and one of NASA's reliability experts, Stephanie Herrin, registered for a PhD degree in the Department.

Dr Kara-Zaitri said: "Just imagine - billions of things can go wrong with any space shuttle mission and the financial implications could be catastrophic. Stephanie's thesis related to the development of a smart diagnostic system capable of tracing the root cause of a given fault and its potential knock-on effects to all system levels. The system developed was applied to the animal holding facility on board the space shuttle." In November 1997, soon after Stephanie had successfully completed her PhD degree, Dr Kara-Zaitri was invited by NASA to spend three weeks at its Ames Research Centre near San Francisco. The objective of the visit was threefold: to conduct research workshops about his work on applications of Intelligent Diagnostic Systems and Fuzzy Reasoning Tools to risk and reliability studies; to share new knowledge about new risk technologies; and to discuss future collaborative research.

Dr Kara-Zaitri said: "I wanted NASA to get more interested in working with me on the development of smart Risk Assessment, Reduction and Management tools. These would ensure improved safety and performance at minimum cost.

The tools would look much further than single point failures and focus on the qualitative and quantitative analyses of the occurrence of combinations of important events. The tools would also help identify minimal, cost-effective and/or opportunistic repair in the event of failure - catastrophic or otherwise." Robert Navarro, Chief of System Safety and Mission Assurance Division at Ames Research Centre, together with Senior Risk Analyst Alexis Flippen have also registered for PhDs under the supervision of Dr Kara-Zaitri.

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University - Public Relations - Annual Reports - 2000 Contents - Research

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