Second....
see article in this newsletter on beam element modeling.....
http://www.coade.com/newsletters/jun00.pdf
Best Regards,
John C. Luf
Cleveland Ohio U.S.A when I'm not in Austria
Member B31.3, Piping Engineer - Stress Analysis, Pipe Supports, Component Design, and Surge Analysis... according to my daughters master of unimportant trivia
http://suntzuquote.blogspot.com/
On Mar 3, 2008, at 12:22 PM, Michael Roble wrote:
> I guess I'm just kind of defending my position as a "CAD guy". I > put a lot > of effort into learning this field, and I am very fortunate to know > CAD well > enough to be able to incorporate it in an efficient manner.
I get this from another perspective. I do FEA primarily with ASME Code work and piping analysis as a sub-specialty. I make a pretty good living with computerized analysis, but I'm not as convinced as I used to be that it's as productive as it's made out to be. That includes both CAD and FEA.
The biggest problem I see is that engineers and designers are starting to think that running software will make up for ignorance of first principles. The next biggest is the notion CAD or FEA is an engineering discipline and not simply a tool. At the moment the capability of CAD and FEA software really dwarfs the ability of most users to use any more than a fraction of the capability. And the dark side is that the expanding use of software has really allowed truly ignorant users to make more mistakes, faster and with ever increasing scope of damage. I cite the costs of CAD software glitches to the Airbus program. No software, no way, no time, no how will ever make up for the delay caused by incompatible CATIA versions.
I bridle when I'm introduced as the 'FEA guy.' What I am is a mechanical engineer who uses FEA in my consulting practice. FEA doesn't change anything about what I do which is to provide approaches to solving particular problems. Those problems are solved the way they always were by 'communicating instructions based on physical and mathematical principles so that artisans can give materials found in nature a particular usefulness.' (Quote courtesy of Ray Peabody, my sometime mentor) That's what engineering is all about. The fanciest solid model or computer analysis only has engineering value in that context. The dark side is that ever larger
I think it's way too easy for ignorant people to imagine they're engineers on the strength of being able to turn out slick-looking drawings with CAD software or solid models that are long on graphics but lacking in utility, organization and practicability. And it's even easier for ignorant managers to aggravate the problem by assuming that someone who can work software can also engineer a piping system, despite being unable to specify materials, deal with manufacturing issues, understand the piping codes or the simplest principles of fluid flow. There is also a great tendency to believe that the computer capacity to solve problems quickly obviates the need for organizational and communications skills and the ability to think critically. And as I've preached, to use reference materials.
Which is not to say that we should drop everything and go back to the pre-software days. That would be the one thing stupider than going on the way we are. I think we need to start thinking about how we're using the tools and how to get the best out of them. And the engineering community needs to stop allowing itseelf to be viewed as a vertical market and start demanding that developers eliminate bugs and feature bloat and stop shipping product that makes changes only to force the users to pay for and learn updates that don't improve productivity.
Christopher Wright P.E. |"They couldn't hit an elephant at
chrisw@skypoint. com | this distance" (last words of Gen.
............ ......... ......... ......... | John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania
1864)
http://www.skypoint .com/~chrisw/
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed] Received on Mon Mar 03 16:44:00 2008
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