What Software do Mechanical Engineers NEED to Know in 2024

I came out with a video a couple months ago breaking down the three essential types of software that every mechanical engineer and Engineering student must learn first is of course computer AED design or CAD software second is computer aided engineering or CAE software and third is programming and computational software there's a common misconception that mechanical engineers only do Hands-On work as part of their job and we see this portrayed regularly in movies but the reality is we spend countless hours on a computer doing all kinds of fun and tedious work now because I didn't go into as much detail as I wanted to in that video today I want to dive deeper into CAE and simulation software I'll explain what CAE or simulation is used for why it's so important for mechanical engineers and engineering students to get good at it and which specific simulation software you should learn to maximize your chances of getting job offers and catapulting your career I'll also be giving you several effective tips to mastering simulation if your dream job is to build simulations at companies like Tesla now before we get started I just want to say a huge thank you to ran simulation a leader at the Forefront of simulation driven design for sponsoring today's video Rand simulation is an ancest elite Channel partner and a full service engineering firm specializing in all things simulation Rand simulation provides consulting services for electr magnetic structural fluid Optical and photonic engineering projects along with training and support to get your team up to speed with the latest ancest software Rand simulation also sells ancest engineering software to Innovative companies across the United States and Canada optimize your designs with the latest ancis simulation tools by partnering with rans simulation today by visiting ransom. comom by scanning the QR code or visiting the link in the description below as mechanical engineers we get to design some pretty cool products from anything as small as an airpod to anything as big as spacex's Starship using cast software like solarworks and Creo universities teach us the process of creating parts and assembling them and Cat software but what they fail to teach us is the science of Designing Parts leveraging a variety of manufacturing processes for low or high volume production this is referred to designed for manufacturer or D F M for short and it's an indispensable skill to have in your toolbox part manufacturability has a direct impact on product cost quality and performance so it makes perfect sense that dfm is a top skill that employers look for in candidates aside from manufacturability the products that we design also have to be safe reliable and function as intended this means we have to come up with tests to validate the design performance functionality reliability ility durability serviceability all of that jazz throughout the product development process before products are sold they have to go through multiple rounds of intense testing to ensure they are compliant with technical safety and performance regulations as well as to receive any certifications and ratings several common standards you might often see include UL en CSA I Mill and ISO for example you'll often see a UL listed symbol on the certification label of Standalone consumables like an apple USB power adapter if we take a look at the iPhone 15 we see it's rated to ip68 under IEC standard 60529 all of these products had to undergo a series of stringent tests to receive these certifications and ratings some tests that the modern-day smartphone has to go through include drop vibration environmental battery Ingress button click cosmetic testing the list goes on commercial airplanes also need to be certified by the FAA easa or equivalent before being sold this process can take a whopping 9 years and if it's fast it will still take 5 years which is how long the Boeing 737 Max took to get certified perhaps it should have taken longer now you might be wondering how any of this relates to simulation software so the product development process is complicated and can take anywhere between 1 to 10 years depending on what it is you're designing it's the dream of every company to shrink development cycles and get products to Market faster to maximize growth and profitability however as you probably know products today aren't purely mechanical like they once were and are jam-packed with electronics and sensors for consumers this is really good but for product designers it makes things a bit more tricky so luckily for us this is finally where simulation software comes into play and can potentially reduce product development Times by over 50% and this day and age with Computing CPUs and gpus and AI developing at an unprecedented Speed Learning simulation tools is a must because it differentiates you from other mechanical engineers and acts as a unique selling point here's why it gives you the power to initially test out a bunch of designs upfront in the product development cycle without the need to physically build anything once you nail down a preliminary design you can start to build a prototype and proof of concept as you design more and more parts and the overall system gets more complex you constantly need to predict the behavior of your designs as you make tweaks and changes before the final testing of the product that we mentioned earlier the old school method would be to build a prototype break it and iterate product designers in the past had immense pressure to get the first model near perfect and projects invested most of their budget and resources on excessive prototyping testing and Analysis there was so much guesswork over engineering and uncertainty involved and less time to innovate however simulations eliminate all of these problems and allow us to analyze both solids and fluids involving complex interactions and coupled phenomena including structural thermal electromagnetic chemical and Optical problems now imagine you're developing a million dooll race car or a mission critical rocket and you're only given a year to do so 20 or 30 years ago you would probably be cranking out Parts in cat software on Windows 98 doing some hand calculations having Parts made in the machine shop and testing them in a lab to understand the system Behavior now you can pivot between design and simulation right from the get-go on your computer to gain valuable product insights within minutes for example using finite element analysis or FAA software you can export different types of materials and figure out how much material to remove from the vehicle frame to save weight and in what areas to remove material for the frame to still be able to withstand a maximum level of stress if it's a rocket you can use computational fluid Dynamic software to determine the optimal fin geometry and quantity needed to minimize turbulence by conducting a design of experiments and iterate through various design parameters and ideally arrive at an optimal solution within several weeks so you don't need to test thousands of prototypes in the lab which would take you well over a year and cost a fortune now there are tons of simulation software packages out there and we'll talk about which ones you should learn a bit later but the level of detail that can be achieved with CA software today is insane for instance aners mechanical provides users with the ability to model complex details of injection moded Plastics like the orientation of fibers and the presence of injection stresses in the parts yielding an incredibly accurate model so by this point hopefully you're able to see the importance of simulation and all of the advantages it offers it's not meant to replace R roll testing entirely but instead streamline a product development process allowing Engineers to determine and address flaws early on and efficiently see how every design decision affects the overall product I think this is special because it encourages a culture that says hey it's okay to make mistakes and test out creative ideas because mistakes can be instantly fixed by clicking several buttons all of the Leading Edge companies are starting to invest in simulation software and engineers well-versed in CAE more than ever to create better products cut costs and get to Market faster so finally we come to the million dooll question which CAE and simulation software should you be investing your time learning to answer this question we first have to understand the two categories that are available the first category is embedded into your typical CAD software like solar Works Creo NX and AutoCAD the second category is Standalone simulation software like ansis Abacus nastran console and hyperworks so what's the difference simulation software embedded into CAD costs a lot less in terms of licenses hence they're easier to access and learn but they're also a lot less capable compared to your dedicated simulation software it's suitable for simulating simple static linear problems and will very likely have trouble solving more complicated nonlinear dynamic problems with large loads and deformations dedicated simulation software like ances are more expensive but can handle basically any linear or nonlinear problem that you throw at it involving various applications like fatigue fracture vibrations impact explosions and compressible fluids you also have the option to choose from a range of solvers and code your own sub routines to Define custom materials loads boundary conditions and failure models so with which one you ultimately learn depends on what kind of analysis you want to do it's like someone asks you if a truck or a high-speed car is better both are for transport if you're simply looking to get your feet wet and learn the basics of simulation try setting up several simple problems in Sol works or Creo simulation first CAE is way more than just learning how to use software it's about making the right assumptions defining loads boundary conditions and materials meshing and solving problem accurately for example you can try simulating several various load cases for a Canon lever Beam made of different materials and validate the deflection and stress results with hand calculations once you're familiar with the fundamentals of the CAE process and have successfully set up several problems in CAD embedded simulation software you can finally give dedicated simulation software AO this especially applies to you if you want to become a mechanical engineer specializing in numerical and computational methods and keep in mind that companies will have a bunch of different job titles for simulation Engineers including CAE engineer FAA engineer cfd engineer simulation and modeling engineer Etc now I always recommend everyone to learn Anis which is the gold standard offering a versatile selection of software products for analyzing the most challenging engineering problems learn ansers fluent for fluid problems ansers mechanical and LSD for complex structural and impact problems zMAX for optical and Laser system design Anis thermal desktop for heat transfer problems Anis Maxwell for analyzing electromagnetic and electromechanical devices Anis forming for simulating Sheet Metal forming and a whole lot more Abacus hyperworks nastran Ansa and star CCM are also very popular and used across many Industries like automotive tech and Aerospace now it's already been established that simulation software offers many benefits however it's worth mentioning here that building simulations that accurately capture and represent real world behavior of a system requires a deep level understanding in math and physics I see a lot of companies making the mistake of investing in CAE software when they don't even understand it and think that any mechanical engineer will be able to click some buttons in the guey and outp the result ads but unfortunately CAE analysis is very technical and can even be counterproductive for a project if you don't know what's going on so that's why you see apple Amazon Ford and all the big companies building their own simulation departments and hiring mechanical engineers with Masters and PhD degrees specializing in numerical and computation engineering methods the smaller smarter companies will Outsource their simulation work to consulting firm firms like Rand simulation because they'll obtain more accurate and useful results much quicker and cheaper than if they were to purchase simulation software and hire an entire team of simulation Engineers so rather than focusing too much on which simulation software to learn a better way to approach simulation is by mastering the three steps of the CAE analysis process pre-processing solving and postprocessing now each physical problem is unique but in in general the first stage of CAE analysis is pre-processing here you will Define the problem on pen and paper or a whiteboard this includes making the necessary assumptions and is one of the most crucial steps in obtaining accurate results C models contain a lot of physics and interactions so some can take days and even weeks to solve using multiple CPU cores therefore it's very important to make assumptions that simplify a CAE model so that it's workable workable is just a fancy way of saying that the model must be solved with sufficient accuracy within an acceptable time frame using the available computational resources including Ram CPU cores hard drive space Etc it doesn't make sense to build a model that's so accurate and detailed that it takes months to solve likewise you don't want an overly simplified model that can be solved within 2 minutes but yields results that are totally off so for for example two assumptions that you can make to simplify your model are one the materials assigned to the model are homogeneous isotropic and free of internal defects and two ignoring any geometry in the model that have no potential effect on the results but drive up computation time such as chamfered edges small holes and threats you now have yourself a simplified physical model and now you can begin to Define material properties loads boundary conditions and mesh the model all of these are pre-processing steps that will take a lot of practice meshing is one of the hardest parts of pre-processing where the geometry is discretized into elements of various shapes so that the solver can solve the governing equations over the entire set of discrete volumes the quality of your mesh directly impacts the convergence and accuracy of the solution so really make an effort to understand all of the common mesh element shapes such as tetrahedron hexahedron prism and pyramid and their pros and cons when it comes to computer memory and solution convergence additionally learn some metrics for evaluating mesh quality like skewness warpage and aspect ratio also remember that the mesh finest directly affects the accuracy and computation time so know how to run a mesh convergence test after pre-processing you need to have the solver calculate a solution here learn all the the different solver types and what all of the settings like time step actually mean try to understand what the solver is doing behind the scenes based on its output including warning and error messages and build an intuition for troubleshooting finally the post processing stage is where you process and analyze the actual solution such as deformation stresses strains and energy learn how to view output files and manipulate and visualize data in such a way that's easy for others to understand if you do endend up becoming a CAE or simulation engineer you'll find yourself often presenting results and insights to product designers customers and Leadership now I'll wrap up by saying that numerical simulation is a scarce and in demand skill that every mechanical engineer and Engineering student should learn to keep up with the times and have a rewarding career it offers the power to streamline product development workflows cut costs and get products to Market faster simulation allows us to discover and rectify flaws early on efficiently analyze design decisions and innovate more rapidly while simulation software exists in many forms understanding the fundamentals of the CAE analysis process will allow you to quickly learn any simulation software available on the market all right guys I think that's pretty much everything I wanted to cover as always thank you so much for watching if you found this video helpful be sure to smash the Subscribe button and check out my video here where I explain what computational engineering is and I'll see you in the next one peace

Channel: Engineering Gone Wild

Views: 11,379

Keywords: what software do mechanical engineers use, engineering gone wild, engineeringgonewild, what software do engineers use, what software do mechanical engineers need to know, do mechanical engineers need to know programming, what kind of software do engineers use, do mechanical engineers use cad, best software for mechanical engineers, best software for mechanical simulation, best software for mechanical design, what is fea, what is cfd, best simulation software for mechanical engineers

Id: gaRDoGuL0LQ

Length: 18min 14sec (1094 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 31 2024