Guest Blog by Jon Wiening, SIMULIA Product Manager from the 2010 SCC

As a member of the SIMULIA HQ staff located in Providence, Rhode Island, I am proud to be able to finally show off our home city for the first time to our customers and partners attending the 2010 SCC.  The Rhode Island Convention Center has turned out to be an ideal location for the conference with great flow from room to room, perfect sizing, and a great overall location (read: across the street from the Trinity Brew House, my favorite local watering hole).  Also making me proud has been how interesting all of the presentations have been.  It has not been a challenge to stay awake, even after lunch and a few huge chocolate chip cookies.

The day started out with ExxonMobil giving an expansive view of their 30 year journey of using Abaqus simulation from the 80’s to the present.  Many people familiar with Abaqus know about the strong relationship between SIMULIA and ExxonMobil, but this presentation added perspective, giving a sense of the range of engineering problems for which they rely on Abaqus simulation technologies including sealing properties of threaded connectors, reservoir modeling, structural analysis of ships, as well as understanding the effect of iceberg gouging on the ocean floor and buried piping.

While icebergs carving up the sea floor is pretty amazing, the life sciences presentations tend to provide some of the best eye candy.  Watching Abaqus/Explicit simulate a prosthetic lens being rolled up into a tube and injected into an eyeball had no problem holding the audience’s interest.

And after personally attending more than ten presentations over the past two days, it is noteworthy how widely represented Abaqus/Explicit is in the conference papers this year. A substantial percentage of the sustomer papers are showing off what Explicit can do, and with impressive and highly accurate results.  Customers have certainly become very comfortable using both Abaqus/Standard and Abaqus/Explicit, selecting the right tool for the job.

With customers becoming so comfortable with the range and robustness of Abaqus simulation technology, it now seems only natural that the new sessions on Simulation Lifecycle Management and Isight for simulation process automation and design optimization have been standing-room-only throughout the conference.  As Kyle Indermuehle put it, “an engineer’s time should be spent on engineering, not text editing.”  SIMULIA now boasts products that take care of many of the repetitive tasks and let engineers focus on engineering.  Read the press announcement on Isight 4.5 that we released during the conference to learn more about this valuable solution.

The final presentation of the day was the highly anticipated Abaqus 6.10 overview and demo, which showed off the new CFD capabilities and many enhancements of the new release. The audience licked their chops and dreamed of playing working with the new release when they get back to their desks.

Enjoy the video from Day 2 of the SCC,

Jon

2010 Opening Session

The SIMULIA Customer Conference is officially underway! We have a full house of more than 400 international attendees from leading manufacturers and alliance partners. Everyone is abuzz about the latest Abaqus 6.10 enhancements for realistic simulation that were announced in a press release on Monday, but they will have to wait until Wednesday afternoon to see the Abaqus 6.10 demonstration.

There were plenty of great presentations to keep everyone excited in the meantime.

The day was kicked off by keynote speaker Dr. Mattias Olsson, Manager of Virtual Engineering at Tetra Pak. Tetra Pak delivered the first paper package for liquid in 1952 and is still creating new and innovative packages for their customers. They continue to strive to create more eco-friendly packages to decrease the ecological footprint. Engineers at Tetra Pak use realistic simulation across the many phases of development – analyzing how the material will respond while being filled, how it reacts to forming its final shape, can it resist different drop scenarios, how does the carrying film react when carried, how does the container feel to the consumer.

Tetra Pak Products

So you can see that CAE is playing an important role in their development process. Mattias discussed that CAE enables his team to capture knowledge, improve their solutions, and predict behavior during the design phase which is several years before it goes to physical testing. With realistic simulation they can not only improve the quality of the product, but can also get it to market in half the time.

Another highlight of today was a presentation by BMW. As announced in a press release on Tuesday morning, BMW has renewed their commitment to use Abaqus Unified FEA software for the engineering of passive safety in the automaker’s virtual design process. BMW first began employing Abaqus as its exclusive tool for crash simulation in 2004, when vehicle development projects were largely supported by hardware testing and the focus of simulation was on global vehicle behavior. More recently, BMW has begun a strategic shift toward a more complete virtual development process.

The day wrapped up with a general lecture on Simulation Lifecycle Management which featured Frank Popielas, Manager Advanced Engineering in the Sealing Products Group of Dana Holding Corporation. Frank gave an insightful presentation discussing the business value his team is beginning to see through the implementation of SLM. By capturing their existing processes and best practices, Dana is finding more consistency, accuracy and faster turnaround times through easier, coordinated information flow and access.

Time to mingle and enjoy the Partner Reception and Exhibits.

Stayed tune for more updates from the conference

Enjoy, Karen

Energy.  Some people predict that our next wars will be fought over who has possession of energy and its distribution.  The planet’s population and energy appetite is growing, but our resources are not.  What to do? 

Ramping up to next week’s National Innovation Directors Meetings, I wanted to see if I could learn the secret of innovation as it pertains to the Energy Industry.  We’re all told we need innovation to build a sustainable future, and this couldn’t be truer for energy. 

Here’s a little interview with Areva T&D’s (Transmission and Distribution) Eco Design & Innovation Director, Jean-Luc Bessède, also a speaker at the event. 

I also threw in a question about the future of eco design. 

Note that Areva T&D’s mission is to offer “reliable, efficient and environmentally-friendly solutions to improve network stability and make electricity available everywhere.”
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1. Your title is Innovation & Eco Design Director. Where do you separate the two? Isn’t Eco Design where we must focus all of our innovation today?

JLB:  Of course, we must focus all of our innovation today towards eco-friendly solutions.  This is particularly the case in our energy sector, where the increase of renewables, the need for energy efficiency and the reduction of the CO2 emissions will be major drivers in the years to come.

At Areva T&D, our eco-design program formally began more than 10 years ago.  However, eco design is still a new area for engineering, and our program aims at giving tools and methodology to our design teams to enhance the capability of the designer to create innovative eco-friendly solutions that would also fit with customer expectations.

In our search for Green solutions, we also have to deal with cost reductions, improvement of performance, better reliability, tighter development planning or more stringent qualification programs. And our global innovation strategy and programs stand for these.

2. What are the most innovative eco design projects that you’re working on right now?

JLB:  First of all, we are developing a Green Services offer.  We are also developing innovative electrical network management tools that will allow us to improve the global energy efficiency and power quality deliveries to the end-users.  Additionally we are developing eco-friendly solutions for power transformers or swithchgear.
 
3. What’s your secret for innovation, and how do you ensure you’re always pushing the limits further?

JLB:  Unfortunately, there is no secret . . . and innovation is mostly a question of perspective.  It could be considered as a process, as the result of a development strategy, as a commercial success, a technological breakthrough, a sociological change, etc. 

However, three parameters appear to be essential in order to always be in the position to push the limits further :

• Strong expertise in our core business but also regarding the business of our customers;
• Numerous and deep relationships with external partners (universities, regulators, other companies…), including term collaboration agreements ; and
• Heavy investments in R&D.

 
4. Do you use 3D software and collaborative research platforms to invent your products? If so, how does this impact your innovation cycle? If not, why?

JLB:  3D software and collaborative tools are already used and some developments and deployment are running throughout the company. We take benefit from 3D software, to improve the reliability of our equipment and reduce development time through improved electrical and mechanical dimensioning.

Collaborative platforms are necessary for us, due to the spread of our R&D community in many countries and continents.

5. What do you think is the future of eco design?

JLB:  Eco-design is already a reality and applied in the everyday engineering job, in many industries.  But good and efficient tools which could simplify and accelerate the job are and will be more and more necessary.  This is, for sure, an area where further developments will appear.
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Merci beaucoup Jean-Luc! 

Any questions you’d like me to ask Jean-Luc at next week’s National Innovation Directors Meetings ?

Best,

Kate