All textbooks teach you how important the post-processing is. For most Generation Y engineers, post-processing (and maybe even the whole CAE) almost equal to visualization as discussed in this post.

Yes, post-processing is important: it gives you the chance to justify your one-month (or one-day, or one-week, or one-year) work; it shows you something you want or something unexpected.

If you are lucky, you can even show how your simulation matches the experimental results. If you don’t have any experimental data (unfortunately, nowadays, this is not uncommon any more), you can still justify your results against common sense.

Of course, “right” or “accurate” results are not the goal of simulation.  The purposes of simulation usually  include:

• to get some data or insights that are impossible, or impractical, or too expensive, from experiments or physical tests (so that the process or system or physics can be better understood; for PhD students, more colorful figures in papers and thesis) ;
• to diagnose the problems encountered of a system (or a component) in real-world operation (so that the possible causes or scapegoats can be identified);
• to predicate the performance of a system

… Read the rest “From post-processing and visualization to simulation result exploration”

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But how to define a high-quality, or more preciously good, mesh? Reading the output of mesh quality report in your meshing software is only the first step; you need to make judgements whether the mesh is good enough for your physical problem.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of misunderstanding of good mesh. Nowadays, it is hard to find meshing course in engineering departments. The numerical algorithm in most engineering schools is optional. So, it is not surprising, the new generation CAE users lack some fundamental knowledge on how meshing works in a CAE system.

Here are the top 5 misunderstandings on a good mesh.

#1. Good mesh must follow CAD model well.

More and more CAE users are designers, as explained in the previous post. They are generally well trained in CAD, and they tend to bring all details to analysis. They believe more details means more close to the reality.

This is not true, most of the time. Good mesh need resolve physics, … Read the rest “Top 5 misunderstandings on (good) mesh”

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The two parties involved usually are not balanced: a big shark in the CAE or PLM market and an almost unheard (for the majority of CAE users) name.  For the smaller party, who usually has something special in a niche market, the partnership gives them greater exposure to more potential customers; while for the bigger party, such a partnership can complement their product portfolios so that they can provide a broader solution.

An interesting example is the partnership between ANSYS and LSTC. Before ANSYS acquired Century Dynamics in 2005, they did not have their own explicit solvers, while the major competitors, Abaqus and MSC, both had. So the partnership was critical for ANSYS to provide a full FEA solution. For LSTC, of course, ANSYS becomes one of their major distributors of their LS-DYNA solver. However, such a partnership becomes less important for ANSYS because they now have their own explicit solver (Autodyn).

So, just like any real-world relationships, the partnership is never … Read the rest “Partnership in CAE Industry”

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CAE software is still not a mass product for the time being. The required knowledge and input from the user make it almost impossible to just use fingers. You still need a mouse, for the time being. It is probably impractical to expect dramatic changes in the requirements of the users.

Unarguably, simulation has penetrated into more and more industries. A lot of companies have used it in the very early design stage to shorten the development cycle and to reduce the prototyping costs. Most of them achieved their goals, at least partially. This, therefore, gradually changes the profiles of CAE users.

More and more designers join the of CAE Jihad. Their No.1 demand is ease of use.

In the old days, CAE users were looking for functions, capabilities, accuracy and flexibility. They are willing to learn some strange languages only can be used for specific software, and enjoying to play with the ASCII input files without using any GUIs or UIs.

Ten years ago, if you … Read the rest “Ease of use, why is it important for CAE software?”

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We are frustrated with the numerous CAD/CAM/CAE/PLM/PDM magazines, which have articles similar to marketing materials: lack of depth. Such articles may mislead the CAE professionals, although they provide the updates on the industry.

We are also frustrated with the market research reports produced by some research firms. Unfortunately, a lot of these researchers even  cannot ask a proper question, and therefore cannot present a clear picture of the industry, because they do not have any knowledge on CAE.

So, here comes CAE Watch.

We will give you in-depth analysis on the CAE  industry and share with you the advanced techniques in both FEA and CFD. In addition, you can ask any CAE related questions: FEA, CFD, PLM, HPC, preprocessing, post-processing, meshing, CAD import…, and our experts will try to give you the most relevant and accurate answer.

Not enough?

 … Read the rest “CAEWatch, WTF?”

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