Hey folks! Are you fond of puzzles? especially, technical one's?
Let's put on our thinking caps because it's time to solve a problem. Who needs Sudoku when you've got finite element analysis, right?
In this article, we will discuss:
1) How CAE is used for solving real-world problems
2) Example of Drop test
3) Physics behind Drop test
Solving a problem
For the sake of simplicity, we shall define CAE roughly as – Solving industrial problems using principles of physics with the help of FEA softwares and some thinking. Why specifically 'Industrial problems'? What about other places?
Actually, CAE is not just limited to any typical Industry. It has scope everywhere including Research, Construction, Biomedical, Smart structure design, Surgical equipment design, Earthquake engineering and even Sports to name a few. But for now, let's focus only on the term industrial problems because it will be easy for us to simplify and also most of the working professionals you'll meet will be the ones doing CAE for industries, both large scale and small scale.
Now, imagine this - You decided to buy a brand-new Refrigerator on coming weekend. After shortlisting your favorite refrigerator, you want to transport it to your house from the showroom.
But a crazy thing happens. while transporting, the refrigerator gets dropped on the floor by one of the workers during handling (mishandling!). There's not much damage caused as it was well-packed and cushioned inside the box. However, after using it for few days, one day, you realize that the refrigerator's compressor has developed a leak.
If you remember your Engineering days - the compressor is a vital component of a refrigerator's cooling system, and it works by compressing refrigerant gas and circulating it through the coils in the fridge. If there is a leak in the compressor, the refrigerant can escape, which can result in a decrease in cooling efficiency or complete failure of the refrigerator.
This wouldn't have happened if that stupid worker didn't drop your lovely refrigerator while transporting! But hey, relax. Such incidents are common, and they occur in everyone's lives. All you could do now is stop imagining further because overthinking is not much productive.
Designing the product (refrigerator in our case) in such a way that even if it falls from a height of one meter, the individual components comprising the product should remain intact or safe - this is the problem faced by Engineer's of that company now (because you gave your feedback about the product to the company) and this problem needs to be solved with the help of Design and CAE team.
As a CAE Engineer, you don't need to conduct hundreds of physical tests and arrive at the perfect design of the final product. Instead, you do it virtually by carrying out iterations/simulations so that ultimately the cost for number of physical trials is reduced. That's the magic of CAE.
As we discussed in previous steps, carrying out these virtual tests or simulations requires a good knowledge of physics or principles governing the phenomena (Drop test) otherwise the solution you provide could go wrong.
Example: Drop test
To be more specific, a drop test is a type of test typically carried out on products that are prone to being dropped or experiencing impacts during their use or transport. These tests are designed to evaluate the product's ability to withstand drops and impacts and to ensure that they are robust enough to survive in real-world conditions.
Some common examples of products that undergo drop testing include mobile phones, laptops, tablets, consumer electronics, and packaging materials.
[You may checkout this video for clarity - Smartphone drop test ]
Coming back to our previous question - How do the 3 basic elements FIT together for solving a problem?
The answer in this case is very easy. First, you do some hand calculations for finding the final velocity (velocity of object the moment it touches the floor) which is calculated by balancing the Potential energy with Kinetic energy or
1/2 mv^2 = mgh.
Upon solving further, we get v=sqrt(2gh) which is nothing but the final velocity. This value is given as an input to the falling object (say refrigerator). No matter how large the drop height is, the input velocity is always calculated by the above equation. This first step is only possible if you know how to balance out the energies or the physics behind drop/freefall - Fundamentals.
Before you begin the model set-up, you need to imagine how the object under study would act as this process saves significant amount of time required for analysis (and time is money).
You must first do a mental simulation of the phenomena. Such visualization gives a clear picture on behavior of the object like - which parts have higher chance of deformation upon impact, how changing the boundary conditions can affect the results or how will the run time get affected if instead of Single surface you defined Surface to Surface contact. - Imagination.
Next, all that stuff where you give the correct boundary conditions (as calculated), define the materials and properties to components, define the contacts between parts along with awesome modeling depends on how good, fast and accurate you are at using the tool (FEA Software) - Tool expertise.
I'm sure now you got some basic idea. This problem that we saw just now is only one normal drop test. There exists a number of physical tests and validation techniques in the real world where CAE Engineer's are required which requires expertise in various other FEA tools and mastery in underlying physics concepts.
If this doesn't sound interesting, you can switch to IT field like others.
Good luck!
P.S - A problem in CAE can be solved effectively and accurately with the help of checklists which I'll be sharing with you in coming articles.
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