Check it Out:  "A Letter to Engineers"

By Anthony J. Lockwood

January 12, 2009

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

If you’re like me, you’re ready to tear down the Santa lights blazing at your neighbor’s house. Still, excuse me one more holiday reference. Remember Alistair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol”  singing “I don’t know anything” when he awoke on Christmas morning to discover that all those ghosts who visited him were just a nightmare? I thought of that scene when I was reading today’s Check it Out paper “A Letter to Engineers”  written by Philip Mische, a Senior Applications Engineer at AMPS Technologies. There are a lot of ghosts in engineering software, and some of them are scary.

Now, I’ll be square with you. About half of this 3-page PDF you might think of as marketing because it talks about what AMPS For Engineers can do for you. You should read anyway, because this FEA tool set has a lot to offer you.

AMPS For Engineers is a MultiBody/MultiPhysics FEA tool. That means you can couple analyses of multiple physics phenomena like heat transfer,  non-linear, fluids, and contact then predict the interactions between multiple parts without defining the interaction. AMPS For Engineers was also built from the ground up using the latest in computer languages and architectures, meaning it’s fast. As well, it’s up to the minute as the latest in physics developments, meaning its modern not updated. All of which leads us back to the other half of this paper and good old Mr. Scrooge.

Scrooge’s dream left him dancing with glee and the knowledge that he did not know anything about the mysteries of life. Which raises the question: how do you know about your FEA software? How old is at the core? How many patches does it have? How much approximating does it do? How much do you know about your FEA software if don’t you know those answers? These are the sorts questions that the first part of this paper poses to you. How you answer them may not leaving you dancing with glee.

It’s worth your time reading this short open letter to engineers even if you’re not in the market for a new FEA toolset. It gets you thinking. When you finish, you can sign up for a complimentary 30-day trial version of AMPS For Engineers and see for yourself what it can do for you.

Thanks, pal.—Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering