On the Road Yet Again

Spring was a busy travel season for the editors at Digital Engineering. Our entire team visited a number of industry trade shows focused on simulation and additive manufacturing, and while there were some troubling signs of economic uncertainty coming from Washington, D.C., there was a burgeoning sense of optimism out on the show floor.

 

In March, I attended the NAFEMS ASSESS Summit in Georgia, where leading simulation vendors, academics and end users gathered to discuss leading-edge applications and strategies for expanding the use of simulation across the design workflow. This was the last event headed by ASSESS founder Joe Walsh, so attendees were able to look back at how far the industry has come, while also mapping out future directions.

Kenneth Wong made his way to NVIDIA GTC, which has rapidly emerged as a go-to event for bleeding-edge computing applications—including a significant engineering design and simulation presence. Artificial intelligence (AI) was a key focus, of course.

Stephanie Skernivitz headed to AMUG in Chicago, while I attended RAPID+TCT in Detroit. Both of these additive manufacturing conferences were held in the wake of some pretty down years for the industry as a whole, but there plenty of examples of growth areas in terms of applications and materials, and I got the sense that hardware companies in this space are finally coming to terms with the best route forward for integrating 3D printing into manufacturing facilities.

In May we covered the Dell Technologies World conference and NAFEMS World Congress (although they were too late in the month to include in this issue). Dell featured another keynote appearance from NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang (who also headlined COMPUTEX the same week), as well as a ton of AI-related sessions.

RAPID happened to fall a week after President Trump’s much-touted “Liberation Day,” during which he announced a wide range of very steep tariffs, that have since been reduced, eliminated or generally bounced up and down ever since. No one at RAPID wanted to go on the record discussing tariffs (no surprise) but there was a general sense that onshoring and supply chain security could be good for additive manufacturing, but herky-jerky tariffs targeted at friend and foe alike, and applied even to raw materials with no domestic production capacity in the U.S., were going to make it tough to do any long-term planning for manufacturers. 

You can read our coverage of these shows in this issue, along with a wide range of articles on new developments in automotive design.