Dr. Chih-Li Sung, Assistant Professor in STT, and his colleagues, receive prestigious SPES award from ASA for research applied to physics and engineering.

Dr. Chih-Li Sung and his collaborators (Dr. Simon Mak from Duke, Dr. Xingjian Wang from Florida Tech, Dr. Shiang-Ting Yeh from Raytheon, Drs. Yu-Hung Chang, V. Roshan Joseph, Vigor Yang, and C. F. Jeff Wu from Georgia Tech) have received the 2019 Statistics in Physical and Engineering Sciences (SPES) Award from the ASA, for the paper "An Efficient Surrogate Model for Emulation and Physics Extraction of Large Eddy Simulations”.  The SPES Award is awarded annually to a distinguished paper for its innovative use of statistics to solve a high-impact problem in the physical and engineering sciences.

The team has provided an efficient surrogate model by incorporating known physical properties into a statistical model, for predicting turbulent flows in a swirl injector, a mechanical component with a wide variety of engineering applications. In particular, this work provides the potential for designing current and future liquid rocket engines. Their paper was published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association in 2018 (https://amstat.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01621459.2017.1409123). Further details about the award can be found at https://www.amstat.org/ASA/Your-Career/Awards/Statistics-in-Physical-Engineering-Sciences-Award.aspx.