TECHNIA’s Johan Kolfors describes how simulation is changing the way design engineers approach their craft.
This video was sponsored by TECHNIA.
Engineers today face multiple challenges. Designs must be optimized for low-cost, light weight, long life and environmental sustainability. These requirements are frequently conflicting, but the search for the optimum design goes on regardless. New plastic resins, metal alloys and composite materials offer significant performance advantages over commodity materials, adding options for designers. Not only new materials, but new processes such as 3D printing offer design engineers new flexibility in making parts and products of extreme complexity—parts that could not be made with conventional processes at any cost. Simulation is the key to unlocking the potential of new materials and processes. TECHNIA director of simulation Johan Kölfors discusses the state-of-the-art with engineering.com’s Jim Anderton.
Learn more about about how simulation-driven design can help make sustainable products.
The transcript below has been edited for clarity.
Jim Anderton: Hello everyone, and welcome to Designing the Future. The object of engineering design is simple. Take an idea, then develop it, render it and release it for production or deployment. Now for most of engineering history, testing the safety, practicality, and usefulness of a design was a matter of redesign, testing, and prototyping. It’s an expensive way to achieve perfection, but modern tools allow engineers to iterate their way to success virtually, and the simulation tools can do more than just virtually test parts. Joining me today to talk about how these modern tools are changing the way engineering professionals approach their art as Johan Kölfors, Director of Simulation for TECHNIA, the global Dassault systems partner. Johan is a civil engineer and holds an MSC in Civil Engineering from Lund university in Lund, Sweden. Johann, welcome to the show.
Johan Kölfors: Thank you, James. Nice to be here.
Jim Anderton: Johan, tell me a little bit about TECHNIA.
Johan Kölfors: Yeah. TECHNIA is an expert company in the field of PLM engineering and simulation, and I’m responsible for the simulation team, TECHNIA Simulation, and we are 60 simulation experts today, covering 14 different countries and with expertise in a wide range of different simulation domains, helping our customers to use simulation, to create better and more sustainable products.
Jim Anderton: Johan, simulation is such a broad topic. There’s so much to talk about. It’s hard to even know where to start, but one thing that we talk a lot about now in the Americas and Europe and Asia, everywhere, is sustainability. We know that we’re working toward decarbonization of many aspects of society, of the economy. This has ripple effects in everything, from the way we make concrete to the way we make airliners. Can you tell me a little bit about what you feel the role of simulation is in approaching the sustainability problem?
Johan Kölfors: Yeah, true. And I think most companies have high on their agenda to create, to develop more, better products, more sustainable products. And I’m convinced that simulation has a very important role to play to make that happen. So simulation makes it possible to explore more design alternatives within a certain space of time. So this makes it possible to optimize products, to make them lighter, use less material and less energy, for instance. So simulation is, for sure, very important in the creation of more sustainable products. And something that I would point out is the importance of introducing simulation earlier in the design process to really get the full benefit out of simulation. So, and if many companies still use simulation quite late in the design process and use it more for validation of a design and maybe replace some of the physical prototyping with virtual prototyping, but to get the full benefit out of simulation, it should be used all in the design process, when you still have a lot of design options available.
Jim Anderton: In my introduction in general, many people think of simulation, as you described it, as just a validation and testing tool. I designed the part and I virtually test it using simulation and then discover, all right, I have a problem that I go back and redesign in that conventional iterative way. When you talk about integrating simulation earlier in the design process, are you referring to integrating it into the concept stage of design or into the point where you’re testing sub-assemblies or individual parts rather than all up testing of a whole design?
Johan Kölfors: It could, in many cases, be introduced as early as in the concept phase, absolutely, using maybe simpler simulation strategies or models for simulation, and then introduce more complexity into the models later in the design process. But in order to do this, it is important to introduce what we call the MODSIM concept, when we make simulation available, not only for simulation experts, but also to design engineers that is involved in the project earlier in the process. So we help a lot of our customers to implement this MODSIM concept based on, in most cases, based on the 3D experience platform from the source system, making it available to use different types of simulation roles for this different types of users in the organization. So it’s smaller subsets of the simulation tools for design engineers. We have guided workflows to make it easier to use and easier to learn, and then the full set of functionality for the experts, but everybody is using the same data and it’s based on the CAD data. So there is no need for exchanging CAD geometry files, and so on.
Jim Anderton: We always, of course, think about the high profile industries when we think about any of these advanced engineering tools like simulation, we think of aerospace, we think of automotive, but there’s a broad spectrum, of course, of industries that use design into the process industries into, even these days, even areas like agriculture, areas that are not traditionally thought of as conventional part making industries there. Does simulation have a role in areas outside those conventional metal cutting, traditional engineering fields?
Johan Kölfors: Absolutely. And one industry or one area that is growing very quickly is life science and medical equipment. So I would say that simulation would be beneficial in most industries.
Jim Anderton: Johan, these days 3D printing is very popular. It’s moving beyond just a prototyping technology into a production technology. And now parts are being made this way. And of course, additive manufacturing, it allows a designer some freedom to design parts that are radically different in shape and form than the traditional way that we sort of think of the triangle of forces, and some of these parts are very organically shaped. They look almost like biological structures, like the bones of animal, perhaps. Does simulation have a role to play in this new way of part making?
Johan Kölfors: Absolutely. There is several good softwares on the market for topology optimization, for instance. And the value of this kind of simulations might have been a little bit limited before because of the limitations we had in the manufacturing methods, but, with 3D printing, you could really make any type of shape and you could use the full power of optimization simulations. And so I’m sure that we will see a lot of more consumer products that is 3D printing now when the technique is getting more mature and more inexpensive to use.
Jim Anderton: I’m glad you brought up that point about consumer goods, because we have a new generation of consumer goods now, which are not only made of more sophisticated material with more sophisticated manufacturing processes, but we expect them to be connected now. We’re looking at a future where the shoes in our feet to the appliances that we use every day are all connected through the internet, and they’re moving information back and forth. Does simulation have a role to play in this new connected product design?
Johan Kölfors: Absolutely. We have… I think that is the single fastest growing single domain we see right now, the electromagnetic domain. So as you said, more and more products are getting wireless connected. We see the trends with the electric vehicles and so on. And still a lot of companies in these industries spend a lot of time and a lot of money on physical prototyping, but there is the same option to use simulation for virtual simulation in order to develop new products, to develop antenna sensors of different types.
Jim Anderton: You mentioned this. This of course is… This is a radio frequency world we’re talking about, which is, even within the rum of electronics, is sort of like a black magic historically or operates of on different levels than say just optimizing a schematic. Do you see the simulation tools being equally applicable toward the people that are working in those more, I call, obscure areas of RF technology or connectivity compared to those who are working on, for example, a durable elast- or rubber to make the sole of a shoe? Is it the same simulation tool used by those radically different designers doing different things, or is the tool itself different for each?
Johan Kölfors: The tools could be different, but at the same time, as I mentioned before, we are working mainly with the 3D experience platform from Dassault Systèmes. And that is an environment where all the products from Dassault Systèmes is implemented in the same environment, and that is everything from PLM to CAD and all the different simulation tools. So the solar technology could be a little bit different from application to application, but the interface and the usage are more or less the same.
Jim Anderton: From a product development perspective, Johan, I know that product development or part development, even, it’s often constrained by the need to iterate the design to whatever level of perfection that we desire, whether it’s reliability, whether it’s safety, whatever the parameters are. And historically that meant often making multiple prototypes, then physically testing them to check performance, then going back and then redesigning. So that iterative system was often controlled by physical factors, your ability to have a prototype shop, make something, and then to go and test it. With simulation, we’re looking at a world possibly where we’re going to compress that timeline. Do you think that simulation’s going to take the product development timeline and make the design part of it very much smaller in terms of the part of the overall product development? Will design simply become something that happens lightning fast?
Johan Kölfors: Yeah, like you say, the iterations will be quicker and you could use it for shorten the design time, but you could also use it for exploring more design alternatives in order to really find the best and the most optimal design of your product. And I think in most cases, there will be some kind of mix you’re trying to get the products quicker into the market, but it’s also important that you really have the best product on the market, an optimized product.
Jim Anderton: One of the ways, of course, to hit development within an acceptable timeline, acceptable cost, of course, is to try and reduce the number of iterations. And historically many designers have been quite conservative with the design to make sure that they could achieve those cost and time constraints. With simulation at this point, does this… Will this free designers to be a little more radical in the way they think? Is it possible now to try ideas that may have seemed crazy and just to see if they work and then take it from there?
Johan Kölfors: Yeah, I think so. It wasn’t possible before because it… You need to be quite on track from the beginning. But since you have, you can easily get some results from simulation and explore completely new design concepts. It’s possible also to find completely new and more innovative designs using simulation.
Jim Anderton: Johan, we talk about additive manufacturing as being a hot trend, hot technology. We talked about the internet of things, connectivity. Cloud connectivity, it is on everyone’s lips. Everyone’s talking about it. We now think of collaboration, especially given the constraints of COVID now of teams working remotely, people working remotely, people using software as a service, rather than owning a seat in the traditional way down there. Tell me about the cloud. How does that factor into advanced simulation in this modern engineering world?
Johan Kölfors: Absolutely, simulation is following the same trends, and more and more simulation products are available as cloud simulations. And cloud computing is a really hot trend, and we work together with Dassault in promoting the cloud solutions. And this is something that is important for many new companies that are new to simulation because simulation used to be connected to quite heavy investments in computer hardware and so on. But with the cloud solutions, you can pay when you use it and you don’t need to invest in own computer hardware. So this, it’ll be important to make simulation available for more companies.
Jim Anderton: I’m glad you brought that up because it’s… One thing we’ve noticed historically with all computer-aided design, CAD/CAM, is that early adopters were often very large organizations. They were large airplane companies, automotive companies, companies that had the resources to buy very expensive hardware and software and buy a lot of seats and then sort of put a team together. Then the tier one supplier community that fed them were somewhere large firms. There were the Bosches and Continentals of the world that had similar power to their customers, but behind them were another layer of many more suppliers that were smaller firms. And as we went down the supply chain, the firms became a little bit smaller, and it became more difficult for those firms to use the same high technology tools because they were expensive. You’re talking about a world in which you can sort of pay as you play and you can buy what you need, but not necessarily buy the, a very expensive suite, right out of the gate. Is this something that smaller firms can use to sort of bring up to the level of the large customers?
Johan Kölfors: Absolutely. We have a lot of start startup companies. They can be up and running with CAD and simulation within a couple of hours, I would say, or days. So it is a game changer for many companies. And important, it is the same simulation technology that’s behind the cloud solutions, so it’s not… There is no difference in the capability, in the software capability, it’s the same, only more available and more affordable.
Jim Anderton: Johan, we’ve talked about how there’s a democratizing quality to this simulation software and the smaller works can use it as well. Does this work all the way down to perhaps to the individual consulting engineer working by himself or herself at home, perhaps?
Johan Kölfors: Absolutely. Especially with the 3D experience platform. You could be located anywhere and collaborate with your colleagues located in different countries, different offices, and so on it doesn’t matter. You will still work on the same data. And so you could have a design team in one country, the simulation team working from another country.
Jim Anderton: Johan, for engineers and designers using current tools, is it a difficult task to train to use new tools such as yours at this point? Can those that are familiar with current CAD/CAM technologies train quickly?
Johan Kölfors: If you have been using simulation previously in the career, it’s easy to learn a new simulation tool, but this is also an important part of the TECHNIA simulation offer, to give good training to companies, to train their personnel. And we have a frequent training schedule for it, yeah.
Jim Anderton: Johan, one final question. It’s exciting future. Where do you see simulation 20, 30, perhaps 40 years from now? Will it be radically different from what we see today?
Johan Kölfors: Yeah. In the future, I’m sure that we will see simulation being a very important key knowledge and part of the product development process in most companies. In fact, it will be a natural part of most companies. And that will also be, as we said before, a key to making better and more sustainable products.
Jim Anderton: Johan Kölfors, thanks for joining me on the show today.
Johan Kölfors: Thank you, Jim.
Jim Anderton: And thank you for watching Designing the Future. See you next time.
Learn more about about how simulation-driven design can help make sustainable products.
