New Hardware Design Software

An anonymous reader writes "AScribe is reporting that mechanical engineers from Purdue University have developed software they claim will increase the efficiency of creating a wide range of industrial parts. From the article: 'The new approach integrates the design and analysis processes, which are now carried out separately. Currently, the geometry of a part is first created using computer-aided design, or CAD, software. This geometry is then converted into a mesh of simple shapes, such as triangles or rectangles, which, when analyzed using a computer, indicates the part's strength and other characteristics. The painstaking procedure, called finite-element analysis, is extensively used in industry.'"

Comments

Re:Making a 2 stage process into a 1 stage process

[riprjak]

You can only do away with the analyst if the CAD operator is competent to correctly interpret the results.

The problem with simulation is just that, it is *not* real world performance. Gaining accurate and useful data from FEA or CFD requires competent, skilled and highly trained operators (yes, all 3). Otherwise all you get are pretty coloured pictures.

In line analysis tools built into CAD for near real time analysis of models is nothing new. Its been around for the better part of a decade.

The difference here seems to be swapping your traditional mesh for an interlinked series of geometric primatives; essentially trading one form of approximation for another.

More power to them if this is indeed faster and equally accurate; but I doubt it will be, most of the difficulty these days is not mesh generation (damn near automatic) or Finite Element mathematics (sparse matrix solvers on modern CPUs make a meal of such calculations)... the time comes from the hideously complex multi-physics equations themselves; and these must remain common for equivalent accuracy.

Either way, the press release was typical oversold hype, but the tool SEEMS like it could be useful in low end design descisions.

err!
jak.

Re:Nothing new...maybe

[Overzeetop]

The press release sounds like it was written by somoeone who has never worked in an integrated production environment. Pro/E has had the end-to-end capability for close to a decade (though at $50k a seat). I didn't like (or didn't trust) the meshers in the 90s, and solid elements also didn't always behave properly, especially at boundries, so I did most of the work by hand. Parts of the writeup seem to suggest that the FEM created would contain boundries that would remain static, and the re-meshing would only occur in defined areas, reducing the amount of time to create and (ideally) invert the matrix on the next iteration (sorry it been a long time since I did FEM, excuse the glossyness of that statement). If thats the case, you're really only talking savings in computer time, which for common manufactured parts is probably down in the noise, costwise - who cares if you have to solve a 1e4DOF model if you can do it in a few seconds? The abstract of the actual paper, linked in another post, seems to imply that they're not using FEM to solve the optimization, which would be revolutionary.