Digital Prototyping, Simulation and Analysis: Seven Practitioner Goals

Ora Research Letter on Digital Prototyping, Simulation & Analysis October 15, 2008

By Bruce Jenkins, CEO

In our investigations across manufacturing industry, some key themes recur in how companies are working to increase the value that digital simulation and analysis deliver to product development. Aerospace/defense, automotive, aircraft engine, off-highway equipment, consumer electronics, medical device and other manufacturers we’ve interviewed all want to implement technologies that will help them advance toward seven goals:

1. “PDM for CAE”
2. Tool integration, data integration
3. DOE, DFSS, MDO, robust design
4. Supplier/partner collaboration
5. Producibility
6. User-role-targeted capability sets
7. Industry-specific capability sets

PDM for CAE

Practitioners’ most urgent need, we hear over and over, is for a data management and process management environment tailored for, thus intrinsically cognizant of, digital simulation models, input conditions, results, context, and data pedigree. Analogous to the way conventional PDM systems manage geometric data – 3D assembly models, revision histories, families of parts, design variants, and the workflows that produce them – users want simulation data/process management solutions that can help:

• Capture, archive and classify CAE data – in meaningful context
• Search, retrieve, reuse and reapply CAE data
• Readily re-run or update analyses months or years after the fact, with confidence
• Ensure analysts receive correct and timely inputs from design modifications
• Ensure geometry changes trigger re-analysis
• Ensure re-analysis results feed back to design

Tool integration, data integration

Closely related is the hunt for technologies that can foster:

• Better automated data interchange
• CAE inter-application and inter-discipline data linkages
• Bidirectional CAE-CAD integration
• Closed-loop workflows
• Ready integration into perennially heterogeneous environments

What does each of these entail?

Better automated data interchange

• Among analysis applications and disciplines
• Between geometry modelers and analysis pre/post-processors

CAE inter-application and inter-discipline data linkages

• Among analytic tools for different disciplines – structural, thermal, CFD, acoustic, ...
  • Easier, more efficient, more powerful co-simulation
• Among analytic tools functioning at varying levels of fidelity, resolution, granularity
  • Ability to cascade results from system-level performance simulation tools down to subsystem- and component-level analysis tools
  • Ability for component analysis results to readily inform/modify/update system simulations and whole-product performance models

Bidirectional CAE-CAD integration

Automated, intelligent data interchange between geometry modelers and analysis pre/post-processors

• Better automated, more intelligent generation and updating of simulation models from CAD inputs
• Automated modification of CAD geometry based on analysis results

Closed-loop workflows

Ability to begin analysis early in new projects using a choice of:

• CAD geometry – new, reused, or morphed
• Finite element mesh or other analysis-ready geometric representation
• Prior analysis output

Perennially heterogeneous environments

Practitioner consensus is that digital simulation and analysis is unlikely to follow CAD technology in maturing, or at least arriving at a comparable plateau of functionality, for the foreseeable future. Innovative new CAE solutions and providers will continue coming to market, users believe, and the heterogeneity of their installed CAE environments will continue or increase, not decrease. Thus, new solutions need to be readily integratable with:

• Legacy in-house applications
• Commercial offerings from both:
  • Complementary providers
  • Competing providers

Future Ora Research letters will investigate practitioner requirements for DOE/DFSS/MDO/robust design, supplier/partner collaboration, producibility, user-role-targeted capability sets, industry-specific capability sets and more. Opt in to receive our research letter by email