NAFEMS Launches Webinar Series on CAE Democratization

Democratizing a technology sometimes requires a dramatic drop in price, other times a significantly lower learning curve. Often, it takes both. The computer-aided engineering (CAE) software industry has experimented with several different approaches to make what seems like alchemy more accessible to the common design engineers. It has had some success with CAD-embedded simulation features and SaaS-style brower-based programs, but the latest trend -- simulation packaged as easy-to-use apps -- may prove to be the most effective strategy.

NAFEMS, the industry group dedicated to the finite element analysis (FEA) discipline, is launching a new webinar series devoted to the topic. Announcing the first of the episode (set for August 27), NAFEM writes, "What if, in order to drive a car, you were required to be an expert in the dynamics, principles, and physics involved in exactly how a collection of parts interact to propel you down the road?  The overwhelming majority of us would likely decide to walk.  While this may appear to be an exaggerated example, one could argue that the product simulation world has operated in this way for nearly fifty years." Consequently, the discipline is currently restricted to "custodians of a high level of expertise and experience."

A better strategy, NAFEM suggests, is to "embed such tangible knowledge and intangible judgement into a reusable template." To explore the topic, NAFEM has recruited three panelists:

• Glenn Valine, GKN Driveline
• Malcolm Panthaki, Comet Solutions
• Mike Tiller, Xogeny
• Juan Betts, Front End Analytics

Would the appification of FEA make CAE gurus irrelevant? Panthaki, CTO of Comet Solutions, doesn't think so. "On the surface, it may appear that the job security of the experts is endangered if others can 'do their job.' However, the reality is that the role of the experts simply changes," he points out. "Rather than doing the repetitive, boring, routine analyses themselves, they now work on capturing their expertise in templates (they develop these templates and rules), continue to enhance these best practices, making them more accurate and efficient, and work on more complex analysis problems that will turn into templates in the future."

Just as iTunes and Apple app store invited tumultuous changes to the music industry, a simulation app marketplace has the potential to rock the stable CAE software market, currently dominated by a handful of major players. Panthaki predicts narrowly-focused CAE apps and general-purpose CAE packages must coexist for one simple fact -- They need each other. “The templates and apps necessarily piggyback on these sophisticated tools -- the expertise of the experts is captured as rules in the templates, which then call the general-purpose tools to perform various operations such as geometry modification, mesh generation, and the actual physics calculations," he points out.

Traditional CAE programs originated from workstations and cluster environments (in-house clusters, to be specific). Today, while they facilitate the use of public cloud resources, they still huddle behind company firewalls. The apps' web-friendly nature nudges CAE toward the public cloud, a territory many in the automotive, aerospace, and government sectors view as a security risk. Panthaki reasons, "I see this 'security in the Cloud' issue melting away as more and more companies get past the psychological barrier. There was a time in the not too distant past when the thought of putting company financial data or PLM data on the Cloud was unthinkable"

But even for users who are willing to embrace the Cloud, the forecast is still in the distance. Panthaki observes, "In the first phase, the templates are created and then used mainly by the experts. In the second phase, web interfaces are developed (SimApps) and these are deployed to a broader set of users. Cloud deployment is the final phase, giving a company the option to utilize the vast computing resources available on the Cloud, when needed. This third phase is slow in coming -- most of our customers are now in the second phase."

To learn more about the NAFEMS debut webinar on democratizing simulation, visit this page.