The world of engineering has always been in flux and will continue to change. Engineers are constantly striving to find new solutions to improve machines, products and processes. And not only for the result of their work, but also for their daily work itself. This is why another change from manual drawing to digital drawing (CAD) to automated design is expected. The usage of CAE tools will increase to more and more workstations and will be simplified to be used by the normal engineer instead of highly spcialized specialized experts.
Thus, conventional CAE processes need to be rethought. While conventional software is based on a deep mathematical basis for finite element computation and requiring detailed knowledge of model construction and result interpretation, it must be transformed into a more user-oriented product. The technology of “topology optimization” is one way to generate optimal designs for structural parts. Therefore, such an FE model is solved iteratively, while the number of elements and thus the material is reduced in all areas where low relevance can be found. These iterations are performed until certain boundary conditions (displacement, mass, stress) are not exceeded and as little material as possible is consumed. Unfortunately, this requires a high effort to create and solve highly accurate FE-models with perfect meshes, while the result is far from a final solution. Often unnecessary accuracy is used to determine a rough shape that is never used in this way , but has to be redesigned manually with CAD software. The final geometry therefore often shows a lack of optimization quality and shows semi-optimal results, even though a lot of time and expertise has been spent on.
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