The $6million dollar question for the CFD/CAE industry today is:  Why has CFD not reached the “masses” as some commentators call it for even modest fluid flow, heat and mass transfer simulation on an ad hoc basis?

Throughout a series of short articles we’ll detail how it works, examine some of today’s enabling tools, and take a look at organizations fully leveraging their simulation investments by successfully democratizing simulation today.

FEA is being put in the hands of design engineers; and has also become collaborative, letting design teams work with CAE experts earlier in the design and development process in order to collapse the time it takes to arrive at a final product.

This push for new users means that in 2018, further support will be poured into tools, user interfaces (UI), technology and licensing models that democratize simulation. Even tools like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) give users the ability to better interact and visualize simulations. Tools like this will make CAE easier to use and more pervasive.

The tried-and-true spreadsheet remains an engineering staple despite an eye-popping palette of state-of-the-art technologies, from advanced simulation to product lifecycle management (PLM), each intended to bring efficiencies and productivity gains to design workflows.

Many of you will have been faced with a situation where a design is changing rapidly and finite element analysis (FEA) simulation is struggling to keep up. Changes in geometry have a knock-on effect on the mesh, loads and boundary condition strategy. In this scenario, it is difficult to keep FEA in a proactive role in providing design direction, rather than being used in a reactive checking mode.

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.

The next generation of engineers is growing up with interactive worlds like Minecraft® and immersive virtual reality experiences. When these future engineers take their turn creating products, no doubt the way they play with digital games today will influence the way they do product design tomorrow.

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.

From its computational inception at the Los Alamos National Lab’s T3 group in the late 1950s, CFD analysis had been performed exclusively by specialized analysts who held Ph.D.’s in the subject and had devoted their careers to the discipline. But CFD has seen great change over the past 10 years, with a jump in the number of computer technologies available to all levels and types of engineers and to engineers at smaller companies have more access to CFD than in the past.

Web apps are created for a very specific simulation problem, and allow users of varying expertise to simply enter parameters and receive the correct output.  EASA’s low-code development platform (LCDP) allow users to develop applications with little or no coding required.

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.

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.

RevSim.Org is a new web community that brings together all of the resources and experts to help democratize simulation within an organization.   RevSim.Org co-founder discusses this new initiative with Digital Engineering’s Tony Lockwood at CAASE 18.

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

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.

Given at the CAASE 18 conference, this presentation includes case studies from GKN Driveline and NASA Langley

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 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.

Demand for simulation resources has expanded as engineering firms increase their use of simulation in the design process and throughout product development. That has taxed the IT infrastructure at many firms and left smaller companies struggling to find ways to run more complex simulations absent their own high-performance computing (HPC) resources.

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

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.

Using simulation in product development is nothing new. There are many simulation tools that help users solve practical issues.

Beyond achieving success with important singular issues, engineers and their companies have been trying to achieve a global solution at a system level.  This type of solution encompasses subsystems or components from domains such as mechanical, electrical, thermal and controls, and includes embedded software.

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.

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?

The Democratization of Simulation with Intelligent Templates
Realizing the Full Benefits of Simulation

An “Intelligent Template” is an innovative concept in product development that focuses on the automation of simulation processes across a product family. The template leverages the common functional architecture across the product family using a concept called the Abstract Model. This functional model of the product family is independent of a particular instance of the product design and of its geometry. The template captures the simulation best practices of the organization and enforces them when it is executed on a particular instance of the product design.

Experts must create the templates, but non-experts can use them reliably.

Keith Meintjes, CIMdata Practice Manager, 2012.
This publication is derived from the keynote presentation by Malcolm Panthaki of Comet Solutions at the CIMdata annual conference, PLM Road Map 2011.

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