This trend makes it easier for the next generation of product designers to gain the experience they need at a much younger age. This experience will be a considerable boon to the engineering community once these youth start to enter the workforce.

Rossignol has a team of engineers that work with skiers, designers and others to create new products. Of course, time to market is critical for them in terms of the ski season. With ANSYS Discovery they realized that their engineers could assess changes in real-time and discuss them with the other team members to rapidly explore designs. What was previously a longer and more individual exercise became collaborative not just among engineers, but with every team member benefiting from simulation insight. The engineers could literally capture feedback from the skiers as they came off the slopes and Discovery gave them a joint language to explore product performance.

This white paper discusses the ways that simulation must change to make it a more “democratic” tool that can be used by everyone on the development team — from veteran product engineers to less experienced designers at the beginning of their careers.

By leveraging a growing movement known as Democratizing Simulation, manufacturing, design, and other product development organizations are more fully maximizing their CAE investment.  All of the information you need to get started is just a click away.

PBBL Law Offices in Las Vegas/Orlando approached UberCloud and Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics asking for HPC support in a lawsuit dealing with a twin tower residential condominium. An extensive expert investigation established exterior plaster failure, water intrusion at improper window and roof installations, and high interior humidity levels with apparent biological growth (ABG) observed on interior walls, baseboards and between layers of interior gypsum board at unit partitions.

It’s been well documented how simulation software can both innovate designs and increase product quality, while also reducing costs, risk and development time. However, simulation is still not seeing the boom in usership CAE vendors crave. What gives?

Jeff Rowe comments:

“The second paper is particularly interesting because the Democratization of Engineering Simulation is implemented in many forms. While there are many common characteristics, issues and opportunities across them all, there are also critical differences that need to be identified and explained, to enable a path to achievable solutions.

The first aspect of any form of implementation of DoES is whether or not it is driven by customers or providers of Engineering Simulation.  The second aspect in any form of implementation of DoES is the type of customer that this form of implementation is intended to be used by (Large Enterprise, Small-Medium Business (SMB), Industry Consortium, mixture of customer types).

. . .

The paper surmises that the Democratization of Engineering Simulation, not too surprisingly, is likely to require significant changes to current business models for engineering simulation software and computing infrastructures.

. . .

This paper reinforces what we have witnessed over the past several years. Namely, engineering simulation being conducted earlier and more often in the product development process by ‘non-specialists,’ such as designers and engineers.”

”

The global simulation software market is expected to grow from $6.26 billion in 2017 to $13.45 billion by 2022, at a CAGR of 16.5%.  Similarly, the cloud-based simulation market reached $3.3 billion in 2016, and is expected to have a CAGR of 11.4% through 2025, reaching $8.5 billion.

The University of Buffalo CCR has received a $1M investment from Empire State Development to upgrade their computational servers for industry.  “This investment will allow us to expand a highly successful industry partnership program that has already led to the creation and retention of nearly 100 jobs in the Buffalo Niagara region, and an estimated economic impact of more than $50 million over the past four years,” said Furlani, who added that the project aligns with strategies outlined by the Western New York Regional Economic Development Council.”

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

An automated simulation configuration presented to enable “CFD Democratization in R&D Process”. This presentation includes a Motor housing design case study.

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

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 past year, ESRD collaborated with Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) on this technical paper. The paper was presented at the American Helicopter Society Annual Forum 74 in Phoenix, Arizona May 14-17, 2018.  To view the PDF of the presentation, click below.

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.

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.

P&G determined that software modeling tools are critical for the kind of innovation necessary to develop thousands of consumer products competitively, and has therefore invested heavily in a variety of modeling and simulation technologies. Realizing that the benefits of modeling and simulation could be scaled by orders of magnitude if only these tools could be made usable by a much wider and larger group, P&G turned to EASA to help democratize modeling tools as intuitive streamlined web apps.

Previously limited to specialists, many tools (and related workflows) such as spreadsheets, legacy codes, databases and CAE applications were quickly repackaged as EASA web apps, which offer:
• Ease of use, built in intelligence, consistent look-and-feel, and error-checking
• Ease of access, running with complete reliability (even on mobile devices), with no dependence on locally installed software
• Intellectual property security and audit trail of usage

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.

SSP stands for System Structure and Parameterization. The standard defines an open format for describing systems of interconnected FMUs and the parameterization of such systems. It can also specify multiple configurations of a given system.

SSP is developed as a companion standard to FMI, therefore it is not to be part of the FMI standard itself. Standardization is driven by researchers in the FMI community and has attracted a large amount of interest from industry. Development of SSP has been on-going for a few years, and the first release is scheduled for early 2018. Many tool vendors have begun preparing and users are eagerly waiting.

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.

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.

In today’s design environment, it’s increasingly necessary to combine multiple file types in a single project. If you need to work with parametric, direct and facet modeling within the same project, some CAD platforms require you to move design data across multiple pieces of software.

However, there are CAD systems that integrate parametric, direct and facet modeling into one work environment, saving time and ensuring that no data is lost, regardless of the type of design work you’re performing.

In this 10-page whitepaper, you will learn:

• The current challenges of engineers in small and mid-sized companies
• The broader range of design activities that need support
• Traditional solutions and their drawbacks
• Progressive solutions and their advantages

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

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.

Watch a video here on this Composite Joint Analysis Sim App:

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

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.

A sponsored survey of current and prospective adopters of simulation apps to investigate, identify, analyze and report current adoption drivers and constraints, and potential adoption accelerators

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