Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Pavel Yaroslavovich Tabakov
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Cell: +27 83 564 0774
Tel: +27 31 373 2138
Fax: +27 31 373 2139
Email: pashat@dut.ac.za

Professor Pavel Tabakov graduated from Kiev Civil Engineering Institute, Ukraine in 1986. He did his PhD with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Natal, South Africa. Currently he is a Full Time Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Durban University of Technology.

Professor Pavel Tabakov’s area of research focuses on optimization design of engineering structures using artificial intelligence and evolutionary algorithms. Here his work has mostly concentrated on the optimal design of thick composite pressure vessels based on an exact analytical solution. Because of the anisotropy in composites and the presence of the curvature in cylindrical pressure vessels, the design optimization of such structures presents considerable challenges and difficulty. Moreover, in the case of five or more layers it is hardly possible to find the optimum fiber orientation and their combination through the thickness using any calculus based method. First, the design was accomplished using the genetic algorithm and subjected to the Tsai-Wu failure criterion. Recently he successfully implemented the Big Bang – Big Crunch algorithm for the structural optimization and analysis of large databases. He also developed a new methodology for the classification and cluster analysis of the data in large multidimensional databases by employing randomly traveling hyper-ellipsoids.