Abstract

Digital transformation is impacting every industry - automotive, agriculture, logistics, healthcare, and manufacturing, to name a few. Concurrently, digital technologies are increasingly being used in high schools, colleges, and universities for in-person and remote learning. While, in the past, engineering education coupled classroom lectures with experiments in physical laboratories, an increasing number of courses utilize engineering simulation software to augment teaching. Laboratory experiments, design projects, and physical prototyping are being complemented by simulation and software-based experiential learning. While traditional engineering simulation tools such as the leading CFD, CSM, and CEM packages are extremely accurate and capable of detailed modeling, they are not as easy to use, particularly for undergraduate or high school students. Valuable time is taken away from instruction to having to learn the simulation tool. Furthermore, the excessive time that is taken in connecting with CAD for geometry acquisition/editing and the computation time of the simulation process itself dilutes the value of the tool for the instruction process. In this presentation, we will describe the underlying technology and methods that have been used to create a product well suited for introducing designers and undergraduate students to the art and practice of simulation, allowing them to create concepts leading to designs, as well as perform design space exploration while learning the underlying physics and simulation principles. The main breakthroughs have been in combining, at a deep level, direct geometry modeling methods, voxel-based discretization, a high degree of usability, and the massively parallel numerical methods harnessing the high-performance computing capacity of GPUs for both computation and visualization. While the simulation tools in the past were generally restricted to run on engineering workstations, on powerful personal computers, or on university servers, with the new combined technologies, it is possible to get near-instantaneous results utilizing the capabilities of GPUs on the local machine or on the Cloud. These capabilities are supported by a digital learning system (online courses with simulation tools provided on the cloud) allowing students around the world to be trained in the most complex engineering disciplines. In this talk, we will provide details of the underlying technologies and methods that are suitable for meeting the evolving needs of the many millions of engineering and STEM students by providing educators and students with high-quality education assets and simulation tools accessible to everyone.