Engineering Colloquium Home
Schedule including this lecture.
Goddard Space Flight Center Engineering Colloquium
Date: Monday, October 16, 2000
Baron Fourier established linear partial differential equations as a powerful tool in mathematical physics. His ingenious solution of the heat conduction problem with the sum of trigonometric series not only won him the Grand Prize of the French Academy in 1807, but also laid the foundation for the general method of Fourier series expansion and transformation. Modern spectral analysis is based on this famous discovery. The traditional spectral analysis methods are all Fourier based. Such an approach can only reveal the underlying physics if the process is linear and stationary. To analyze nonlinear and nonstationary data, we have to abandon the accepted paradigm and use a new method. The key part of the new approach is the Empirical Mode Decomposition method with which any complicated data set can be decomposed into a finite and often small number of Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMF), which admits to a well behaved Hilbert transform.
Dr. Norden Huang is a senior fellow at Goddard. He holds a doctoral degree (1967) in Fluid Mechanics and Mathematics from the Johns Hopkins University. He has worked on nonlinear random ocean waves. Recently, he developed a new method, the Hilbert Spectral Analysis, specifically to process nonstationary and nonlinear time series. Over the last few years, he has applied this method to analyze data in the following areas: nonlinear ocean wave evolution data; earthquake signals and structure responses; bridge and structural health monitoring; biomedical signals such as blood pressure fluctuations; long term environmental data such as global temperature variations, Antarctic ice extents records, and solar irradiance variance; hydro-machinery design and machine vibration data. For this invention, he was awarded the 1998 NASA Special Space Act Award and was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering, 2000.
Colloquium Committee Sponsor: Dr. Eugene Waluschka
Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov