Parallel advances
Sometimes when you’re so much immersed in the world of plane frames, you forget how far computational technology has come over a period of time in other related areas. While keeping tabs on the latest pentium processor, I must have blinked through what power it injected into the computing communities looking for a shot in the arm.
There is some mind blowing stuff happening in the world of FEM, and I’ve been living in a world that looked like it was still 1999. That’s because I have been doing business mostly with rod and plate elements instead of solid models. The winds are changing in my industry, and as we go deep water in search of fossil fuel, changes in practices are driving the way we do engineering. Frame structures are being slowly phased out for solid hulls and plated sections.
Unaware of how far the FEM industry has progressed, it was humbling to see some highly advanced features in modelling techniques and analysis procedures, that are now incorporated in today’s mainstream software.
As I now understand, the general purpose software in the world of FEM has leapfrogged into the next generation and changed the way we solve mathematical problems. The prime reason for this is—I believe—due to the thrust in the consumer industries like automobile, product design and aviation. Complimenting this, there’s a ton of research in the field of plates and shells, thanks to the ship building industry that never stopped since the fated Titanic hit that iceberg.
With so much advancement happening in a parallel field, I would be lying to myself if I didn’t say I felt like a freshman all over again.