This month, ASME’s Journal of Mechanical Design published a technical paper I wrote as part of my mechanical engineering master’s research.

This peer-reviewed paper is about error propagation through design models. The formula typically used to analytically propagate error is based on a first-order Taylor series expansion, and consequently, it can be wrong by one or more orders of magnitude for nonlinear systems. Using a higher-order Taylor series does improve the accuracy of the approximation, but this comes at higher and higher computational cost. This paper presents a technique for error propagation that achieves higher-order accuracy but without the additional higher-order cost. This is accomplished by predicting the Taylor series truncation error and applying a “correction factor” to the lower-order model.