International Symposium on Engineering Analysis and Simulation: Frontiers in FEM and CFD Practices

Recent years have witnessed exponential growth in the application of Finite Element Methods (FEM) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) by various industrial domains and these activities often encounter situations wherein novice engineers with insufficient knowledge of the physics of the structure routinely develop computer aided models and deliver 'faulty' solutions. The Finite Element Method has become a black box, with no provisioning for diagnosis of abuses of the system. To address this issue, NAFEMS has been taking several initiatives for many years in the following domains 

• Quality Assurance Procedures for Engineering Analysis and Simulation
• Management of FEM /CFD Procedures Guidelines to Best Practice
• Quality System Supplement to International Standards Relating to Analysis 

This symposium was organised in association with experts from NAFEMS with three primary objectives

1. Enhancement in the safety and accuracy of FEM / CFD practices by providing suitable benchmarking standards
2. Dissemination of information on best practices an thereby mitigate the errors associated with poor approximation
3. Networking the national and international experts from industry, academia, research laboratories and CAE software developers and facilitate collaborations among them with ensuing positive impact on productivity and quality of engineering design process. 

To date, several conferences / seminars have taken place in India with a focus on one or more domain of analysis such as heat transfer, dynamics, optimisation, multiphysics etc. In many of these occasions these interactions are limited to the user groups of particular software tool such as Ansys, Cosmos, Abaqus, NASTRAN etc. For the first time in our country, this symposium addressed analysis / simulation practices on a platform independent of software and domain specificity. Hence the spin off results of the symposium would have wide ranging impact ranging on the activities of national aero space laboratories, ubiquitous automotive industry, life saving bioengineering field, high technology micro/smart systems to all important manufacturing sector.

This meeting was the first NAFEMS involvement in India, and it is hoped that NAFEMS will now become more and more active in this area in the very near future. NAFEMS is working closely with EDAF, the Engineering Design and Analysis Forum, on expanding activities for analysts within India.

For full details, visit EDAF, www.edafindia.org