I, along with a couple of colleagues, put our heads together a couple of years ago and launched a web site to support a growing movement known as “Democratizing Simulation”.   The result of that effort is RevolutionInSimulation.Org (or more concisely: rev-sim.org).

The underlying idea is that today there are a select few individuals within a manufacturing, product development, engineering organization with the experience and expertise to perform engineering simulation.  In a simplistic sense, engineering simulation (also commonly referred to as CAE or Engineering Analysis) is the process to validate product designs for quality, durability, manufacturability, etc.) in the very early upstream stages of new product development.  This greatly reduces – or even eliminates – the need to build and test multiple physical prototypes. The result is a shorter development cycle and less time to get products to market.

Democratizing Simulation allows companies to basically capture and extend the knowledge and experience of expert CAE analysts.  Make no mistake, simulation tools are costly and sophisticated; and represent a serious investment.  Even though simulation software is very advanced, the process to validate designs does not happen at the push of a button.  It requires the use of these technologies along with a certain amount of judgement that comes from experience. The problem is that this often causes a bottleneck as there are many more models to be analyzed than there are experts to perform the task.

Intelligent templates allow companies to capture the experience of their simulation experts extending the capability to perform simulations to non-experts. This democratizes simulation and allows companies to get products validated much faster and evaluate many more designs to boost innovation.

So what about the CAE experts? Does this mean that they are no longer needed?  To the contrary, Democratizing Simulation allows these experts to focus their time on more sophisticated or higher priority simulations.

If you’re interested to learn more about this visit rev-sim.org.  Here you’ll find a host of educational materials including success stories, articles, papers, webinars, videos, presentations, industry events, and much more.