In 2012 CAE Cloud-based applications took three months on average, and the failure rate was about 50%. Although the cloud ‘on-boarding’ process then was already well understood, the major and time-consuming hurdles were still unresolved. Today, with a variety of successful applications, the process is significantly improved.

This presentation includes: Deploying a spreadsheet-based model and Deploying a Matlab-based model.

This presentation touches on the following:

• Definition & distinctives of Democratization
• Issues & benefits of opensource analysis software
• Forklift Bumper model
• Process flow for Open Source
• Process flow for Democratization
• Conclusions & Recommendations

Front End Analytics has developed a set of methodologies to implement Simulation Democratization in large and complex organizations. This methodology is currently being used at major OEMs and Tier-1 Suppliers.  The goals and benefits of this approach are outlined in this presentation.

Simulation has become a more prevalent part of design. Engineers are performing designs more frequently and much earlier in the design process than in the past, and simulations are increasingly being performed by non-specialists using tools with more user-friendly interfaces.

This second decade of the twenty-first century is witnessing an explosion of invention and innovation in digital engineering technologies unrivaled since the 1980s, when so many foundational tools and methods were either created or brought to practical fruition.  Bruce Jenkins (Ora Research) discusses eight megatrends that he believes will drive generational leaps forward in engineering modeling and simulation technologies, methods and work processes through 2020 and well beyond.

This 60-minute webinar shares best practices for accurately modeling & analyzing fastened connections and joints in 2D and 3D, including appropriate simplifying assumptions based on the data of interest. Additionally, a live demo of checking reactions in contact regions/holes, as well as how to perform live-dynamic processing of detailed stresses in multi-part assemblies is provided.

Generating a proposal for a wind farm project was a massive undertaking, involving site suitability analysis, proposal generation, and subsequent project management. The highly manual process involved many disjointed steps involving software, documents and data, emails and meetings in order to obtain the necessary input from experts familiar with specific components and engineering, environmental and business issues. Proposals were taking many weeks to complete, negatively impacting GE’s competitive position.

By creating a custom Simulation App, GE was able to create and deploy a substantially simplified and streamlined solution.

The prime mover of an aircraft, the jet engine, is one of the most important subsystems of an aircraft. Jet engines provide primary power (thrust) and secondary power (to drive flight control, air conditioning, cabin lighting, etc.) to the aircraft. Performance and efficiency improvements are becoming increasingly difficult to achieve when focusing on the engine in isolation. In the past, engine improvements have largely been developed separately in incremental design cycles – these cycles have not considered the need to develop the total aircraft package as an entire unit. Today, aeronautical systems and their subsystems are becoming more and more integrated and therefore simulation models need to become further aligned to meet performance and efficiency needs.

This blog promotes the idea of connecting MBSE and MBD more seamlessly than was previously possible. Using recent results from the ITEA3 EU project MODRIO, a Modelica Library prototype to represent executable requirements is now available, and we have used this library to demonstrate the workflow to develop a simplified version of a vehicle thermal management control system to reduce fuel consumption.

The Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI) standard supports two flavors of Functional Mock-up Units (FMUs), including: Co-Simulation (CS) and Model Exchange (ME). But, do you know the difference?

As an expert in the standard it’s my goal to help users understand the commonalities and differences – getting you to a point in which you’re choosing the best possible technique to achieve your goal! Let’s first look at what the two kinds of FMUs have in common.

As humans concede games to AI, the more substantial challenge of engineering awaits–and it is no game. Can AI be used to solve serious real-world problems like simulation? With AI a buzzword, engineering software vendors are raring to get AI into their products, but is it at that level of capability?

This ASME paper, “Using Templates To Support The Engineering Designer Performing Computer-Based Design Analysis”, authored by Hakan Petersson, discussed how simulation templates can be used by engineering (CAD) designers  to perform complex simulations.

Here is an extract from the Abstract:
The introduction of TBDA in an industrial setting has resulted in many advantages, such as shorter lead times, opportunities to generate more concept candidates, and increased collaboration between the engineering designers and the design analysts, all of them contributing to more mature technical solutions. Three different automation levels of TBDA have also been identified and accounted for as well as being exemplified. In the companies in which TBDA has not been implemented, some of the reasons for not doing so are high costs, company policy, and the lack of knowledge and experience on the part of the engineering designer. This paper presents the results both from the new online survey as well as from the interviews. © 2015 by ASME

ASME 2015 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition: November 13-19, 2015, Houston, Texas, USA, New York: ASME Press, 2015, Vol. 11, article id V011T14A002

PS: Hakan Petersson has published his PhD Thesis on this topic.

The Role of Engineering Simulation is becoming a key enabler of  strategic goals for improving competitiveness
• Increase Innovation
• Increase Quality
• Reduce Risk
• Reduce Time
• Reduce Cost

The demand for software tools for Engineering Simulation is  exploding to support the demand for increased competitiveness and to deal with the rapidly growing complexity of products, processes, and systems.  The “Digital Twin” approach and “Generative Design” will also dramatically increase the demand for Engineering Simulation beyond current usage.

Growth of the Engineering Simulation market is tempered due to lack of expertise available.

The demand is not going away so a Simulation Revolution is needed.

In 2008, NAFEMS Americas held a regional conference with the theme of a “2020 Vision of Engineering Analysis and Simulation.” The objective was to bring together the leading visionaries, developers, and practitioners of CAE-related technologies and business processes to share relevant trends and roadmaps, to explore common themes, and to address these issues in an open forum with the goal to provide attendees with the best “food for thought and action” to support the industry’s evolution over the next several years.

In the seven years that followed, we have witnessed significant advancements in the area of engineering analysis and simulation, the potential of which are not often realized due to a variety of factors, including accessibility, usability, confidence, and financial.

NAFEMS Americas partnered with a number of industry thought leaders and end-users companies to host a series of webinars.

Sim Apps must satisfy several important technical requirements to ensure the level of reliability needed for professional use by experts and non-experts alike.

Ricardo Actis, President & CEO, ESRD, Inc.

June, 2016

Key issues that cloud vendors need to address to improve adoption of HPC cloud resources include: performance issues due to virtualization, a lack of low-latency interconnections, large scale data movement and storage, providing preinstalled and optimized softwre, and cost-competitive pricing.

This third and final installment is focuses on a revolutionary new generation of fit-for-purpose, product-specific and often user-organization-specific simulation “apps.” By placing advanced simulation and analysis technologies “under the hood” from the user’s perspective, simulation apps are making unprecedented powers of automated design exploration, optimization, synthesis and validation accessible, usable and safe for non-analyst engineers and designers across a wide and still growing range of products and industries.

Two decades ago, engineering software developers launched their first efforts to make simulation and analysis capabilities accessible and safe to use by engineers and designers who were not professionally trained analysts.  Let’s see where we are now.

Bruce Jenkins
December, 2016

Comet Founder & CTO, Malcolm Panthaki discusses how Simulation Applications are able to advance product quality, innovation, and productivity by capturing and extending the expertise and knowledge of CAE experts to allow non-experts to safely run simulations.

A recap of the June, 2016 NAFEMS Conference which featured a Democratization Mini-Symposium.

Matt Ladzinski, VP NAFEMS Americas
June, 2016

The role of Simulation Governance in the adoption and deployment of FEA-based simulation apps.

Ricardo Actis, President & CEO of ESRD
April, 2018

Software containers, why they are relevant and how they deliver CAE to the masses.

Burak Yenier and Wolfgang Gentzsch, Co-Founders of UberCloud
June, 2016

GKN’s Glenn Valine discusses the company’s journey to democratized CAE.

GKN Driveline North America
June, 2016

STOP (Structural Thermal Optical Performance) Analysis is enhanced with a reusable CAD-based analysis process.

Tory Scola, NASA Langley Research Center
June, 2016

The role of Cognitive Engineering and Simulation Apps in medical research.

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology & German Cancer Research Center
June, 2016

Altair is democratizing casting simulations with its Click2Cast CAE software. This product is part of Altair’s solidThinking portfolio, which aims to bring CAE tools into the hands of non-experts to promote the use of simulation early in the development cycle. These tools offer intuitive user interfaces (UI), which aim to have both CAE novices and experts trained in a matter of hours.