Engineering is not art. There's much more to product development than welding on whatever you find lying around, Mad Max style, as long as it fits and functions. Engineering must last for a design life that for some products can span decades; and be safe to boot. It's here where the discipline of structural analysis comes to the forefront.
But the influence of the multi-domain 3D revolution is changing things here as well. What was once a back-and-forth battle of disciplines in a typical design process is necessarily becoming something much more streamlined - a parallel synthesis of creativity and analysis.
Structural simulation and analysis has evolved considerably from the days of slide rules, reams of hand calculations, and free body diagrams drawn on graph paper. Today's state-of-the-art involves dedicated Finite Element Model (FEM) tools complete with meshing attached to 3D models and graphical results. However, arcane spreadsheets still reign more often that they probably should. The process is complex, and output is sensitive to fine perturbations. Analysis optimization involves paying careful attention to how nodes are meshed onto solid geometry, defining the right load conditions, and accounting for peculiarities in the solver math model. If you're not careful, it's definitely “a garbage in, garbage out” affair, and often there's little time to take out the trash.
A serial battle of disciplines
Traditional design and structural analysis roles have always naturally been at odds, or perhaps at best, frenemies. The tension isn't about some ancient rivalry over assorted magical crap, but rather that fundamental goals diverge. Simply put, a structurally optimal solution is often not the best or most cost effective to detail, assemble and manufacture, or vice versa.
Traditional development process is a strictly serial affair across disconnected tools, with the starting point often at one extreme or the other, often depending on who gets there first. With a structural analyst on point you might end up with a structurally perfect design with optimal load paths, but it ends up about as practical as building a space tesseract for Matthew McConaughey.
On the other hand, with a designer first on the scene you could very well end up with something affordable and particularly awesome looking, except for the fact that it spontaneously develops fatigue cracks every time you look at it. Naturally, quite a bit of iteration is expected.
The incredible shrinking design cycle
And nothing gets easier, of course. We've talked before about how today's time-to-market pressures are crushing the revered engineering "V." Iterations have to happen faster, and mapping FEM mesh adjustments back to the physical model, or interface changes back to the FEM, limit forward progress. Not to mention the computational overhead in structural analysis, where traditionally some random server in the back was used for crunching the most challenging runs.
It was never fun to try to explain that the reason the entire project was behind schedule was because someone forgot to communicate a change that required a subsequent analysis that was run overnight, caught the server on fire, and involved some stopping, dropping, and rolling. By the way, referring to a structural analyst as a bottleneck is a great way to get yourself punched in the neck. They don't call them stress engineers for nothing, you know.
Paving the way for parallel multi-discipline design
Multi-domain 3D design is all about designing across multiple disciplines in the same space, using the same platform, and the concept certainly applies here. As design tools evolve, manipulating geometry and analysis considerations push toward a consolidated, simultaneous approach to change, where established boundary conditions help define how change can or cannot evolve. And what about all that computational overhead? That's where cloud backends can be leveraged to turn every modeling environment into an analysis powerhouse. Pretty soon, it's going to be the only way to keep up. You can only hope that both design and structural analysis engineers are prepared for new modes of solving tough engineering problems.
