Life Upfront

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Ryan Stamm, Director of CFD Consulting for Imaginit (Rand Worldwide) joins the show to discuss his unique approach to CFD consulting. Ryan began his career as a CAD draftsman, moved into technical roles for CAD resellers, and eventually made a mark in the world of CFD with Blue Ridge Numerics.

After Autodesk’s acquisition of CFdesign, Ryan and a few other Blue Ridge veterans formed Informative Design Partners to focus exclusively on high quality CFD consulting rather than software sales. Their formula was so successful that IDP was then acquired by Rand Worldwide in just 18 months.

In this episode, we cover Ryan’s unique partnering strategy and future plans within Rand Worldwide. Ryan shares his advice on picking a quality CFD consulting company… and a couple of book recommendations for the leader that is a reader. Or, maybe it’s the reader that is a leader.

Vadim Shapiro, CEO of Intact Solutions, joins me to discuss his groundbreaking approach to “meshless” structural FEA analysis. Notice the quotes around that word.

We cover the evolution of the product, Scan-and-Solve, to its current form as a plug-in for Rhino. Today, SnS can be used for linear static simulations in which the user completely bypasses the traditional pain of creating a mesh. Incoming models can be ugly geometry or highly faceted STL-type files… but, still no meshing headaches!

We wrap with an interesting look at possible future uses and homes for the technology.

Mike Shipulski is an engineering leader by day and an engineering evangelist by night… especially Wednesday nights. An established DFMA expert and progressive adopter of new analytic and physical methods,  he is one of the most well rounded engineering thought leaders you’ll find. If you ever see Mike on a conference speaker list, register immediately.

In this interview, Mike discusses the balance between theoretical and practical engineering methods. More importantly, he introduces his concept of “Level 5 Courage” for empowering all engineers to do better.

MidasNFX is a CAE suite just now emerging from South Korea. It offers many of the high-end CAE capabilities you’d expect to see from the expert level tools of Dassault, MSC Software, and ANSYS.  We’re talking everything from nonlinear contact analysis to free surface CFD. All of these capabilities are driven from a single, modern, pre/post GUI.

In this episode, I sit down with Cyprien Rusu, MidasNFX European Business Development Manager, to discuss the details of this comprehensive CAE suite. We cover the claimed capabilities, history of the product and company, and a look at the future growth of MidasNFX outside of Asia.

While I am impressed with Cyprien and the capabilities presented, I make a point to remain a bit skeptical. If MidasNFX can cover this breadth of CAE with accuracy, it could become a threat to the established players. On the other hand, I know how hard it is to get these high end capabilities right. So, I ask my readers to download the trial version and give it a test. Your positive or negative comments will be greatly appreciated below.

John Chawner, president of Pointwise, joins me for an in-depth discussion of meshing technology with a hyper focus on the CFD market.

John answers the question, “If all CFD tools come with a pre-processor, why would anyone want to buy a 3rd party CFD mesher?” We talk about one of John’s least favorite CAE buzz words, “Democratization.” Finally, we cover the need for engineers to develop reasonable writing and communication skills. Note: you’ll learn why it’s important to spellcheck before sending a resume to Pointwise!

Flowkit CEO, Jonas Latt, joins me for part 2 of our discussion. We fill in a few more details about the Open Source CFD tool, Palabos. Then, we dig into plans for a future, cloud-based, commercial tool powered by Palabos.

Jonas explains the natural cloud benefits for FEA or CFD- which may or may not apply to other engineering tools, like CAD. He also shares his view on the value of cloud resources over onsite hardware for both small and large enterprises.

“In CFD, you never have sufficient resources.”

In retrospect, I realized that I buried some of the Lattice Boltzmann lead. LBM can overcome one of the most painful aspects of CFD: meshing. It completely skips the traditional meshing phase. Instead, you can think of it as dropping your object(s) into an existing vat of particles. Note: not all LBM tools take full advantage of this feature, and still require some sort of surface meshing process. Palabos, however, does enable a full “meshless” implementation.

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If I were a betting man, I’d place some money on the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) to eventually shake up the CFD world. There are a few companies focusing on LBM, but I’d also be sliding a few side bets on Flowkit having a major hand in its growth.

Flowkit is a lean, young CFD company enjoying the luxury of building new technology from scratch… without the baggage of decades of existing code/customers, and with the cloud in mind from day 1.

I met Jonas Latt, CEO of Flowkit, about a year ago while researching CAE companies with a focus on the cloud. Jonas educated me on the advantages of Open Source in the CAE space, as well.

In part 1 of this 2 part interview, we’ll dip our toes into LBM and Open Source CAE.

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Sunglass.io is a cloud based platform for 3D collaboration. Its stated mission is to democratize the sharing, collaboration, and creation of 3D content.

This is exactly the kind of technology that will help usher in the age of cloud based, SaaS products in the engineering and product development space.

In this audio interview, Nitin Rao shares the Sunglass background and vision. He also announces the latest product news: new API connections to several commercial CAD packages.

Vuuch is a product focused on social product development. Several engineers just read that sentence and felt ill.

I’m interested in products that help engineering teams to work faster and smarter. If they can do that while actually working together as a team, even better. If the tool they use to do it is cloud based, I’m even more intrigued.

Vuuch promises to do all that with minimal setup and without actually touching your secure CAD data. Squeamish engineers will also be pleased to find that this tool is “practical social”…
not “goofy social.”

In this audio interview, I get to the bottom of the Vuuch value proposition with CEO, Chris Williams.

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MatWeb is a great online resource for all engineers. With searchable properties for over
76,000 materials, you are sure to find the right material for your application.

I recently interviewed one of MatWeb’s founders, Dr. Dale Kipp, to learn more about the service.

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Kenneth Wong recently posted a short article about an interesting new company, Dezineforce. This UK startup promises to dramatically speedup the workflow and effectiveness of engineers engaged in FEA & CFD.

To dig a little deeper, I contacted Dezineforce’s CEO, Dr. Peter Collins. Our resulting interview uncovers Dezineforce’s unique approach to optimizing DOEs and batch solving on remote compute clusters.

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