Computational Engineering: why it may soon change everything
Today, engineering design and validation mistakes repeatedly cost lives through component failures on airplanes and cars; and irreparable environmental damage through emissions scandals and preventable oil spills are just the start of our issues. Combine these needs, the hard push for new generations of products, and the rise of 3D printing, the maker community
Computational Engineering
This is a new approach to engineering design that massively increases the scale and complexity of designs that engineers are able to invent.
- A single engineer has the power to operate with the resource of a whole team, giving teams the ability to invent things that we’ve never seen before.
The Engineering Company
TEC was founded to accelerate the industry to transition to Computational Engineering – what typically takes a generation, they believe can happen in a matter of years
- They’re building the first easy and intuitive design tool for engineers, the underlying technologies that enable it, the first sets of libraries and tutorials to get started, and the seeds for the open-source community to thrive
- If they’re able to build the right tools and make them easy and accessible, they have a chance to permanently change the course of their industry, and perhaps even the human race
We’re entering a new era for engineering
From the 1960s to the 2010s, industry fundamentally changed how engineering was done.
- We moved from Manual Engineering to Digital Engineering (doing work on a computer)
- The tools that we use to design products are barely keeping up, leaving engineers to work harder, miss more family events, and to push to the limits of their endurance, instead of allowing us to work smarter.
Why now?
Engineering costs are too high, we’re behind schedule, and companies need new processes to simply keep up.
- Companies are facing new economic realities with rock bottom oil and gas prices, a shrinking global market and consumers that want the best but don’t want to pay for it
Computational Engineering
The computer does the work for you
- Calculations, geometry generation, design validation, and design validation
- Engineers are in control of the process, not the computer
- With all of the manual execution work done by the computer, engineers can focus on the engineering work that matters – the invention
The Rise of the Open-source Engineering Design
The open-source community helps proliferate innovation, invention, and education throughout an industry
- Without open source, we would not have Linux, Android, most cloud technologies, and hundreds of thousands of games
- Most new projects are built using open source technologies
Engineering Design is moving from Phase 2 to Phase 3
The shift into Phase 3 for Engineering Design will enable cities on Mars, massively more complex robotics, and eventually the Starship Enterprise
- This is a fundamental change in how we do things and it’s hard to imagine how much of an impact it will have on the industry
What happens to Engineers?
Engineers do not get automated away – engineers get superpowers
- The role of the engineer changes, from the executor to the architect
- Today, a 10-year-old kid can create a new python script, write 100 easy lines of code, and pull libraries from Github to design an app, a game, or a neural net in hours
Comments ()