SSA Blog

Sometimes you need to get away from the everyday interactions in a project to see what it achieved.  Preparing a presentation on what the group has done recently was a fantastic opportunity to review our recent history, and caused me to think about where all this was all heading.

Through SSA joining forces with TECHNIA there is a whole new audience for our expertise in simulation. With that in mind, I wanted to introduce you to the wonderful world of non-linear!

The UK SIMULIA Symposium is focused entirely on Simulation and the SIMULIA product range and is a great opportunity to hear expert opinions, see how other users have exploited simulation in an industrial setting and generally catch up with the latest ideas.

I can’t say I look forward to the SSA Customer day (or SIMULIA Symposium as we’ve renamed it) every year… There’s too much to do, too much to think about and too much to worry about.  Things like “what if nobody shows up?” As it turned out I needn’t have worried about the last point overly.

That Concorde represents some form of technical high water mark isn’t really a discussion point at SSA.  There is even a lot of affection for the old thing here, and it seems to be largely undiminished by time.  Where we start to diverge in our group think is the relative roles of the UK and France in the project.  As we all know it’s a British aeroplane, with a small amount of French subcontractor input.

To somebody who has spent their entire career in the mechanical engineering world the built environment seems both familiar and alien at the same time. Some of the challenges are the same, some are very different. But one thing is obvious. That understanding the physics to ever increasing levels of detail and complexity allows more creative and adventurous design solutions to be considered and ultimately completed.

Management is a wonderful and fulfilling occupation, but there are times when you just want to get back into the technology, which, when all is said and done, is why SSA exists at all. 

“There’s not much in it” I said.. “only about 19 pages in the update presentation.” The 19 pages had some nice stuff about a new bolt pre-loading approach and some neat post processing updates, so not all bad. And then the Dassault Systems “If We” page which is the end paper of all official DS powerpoint presentations. Luckily I didn’t express my disappointment with Abaqus 2018 too widely, because the next time I looked at the update presentation I realised that the “If We” slides were being used as a sort of punctuation, and there were in fact 334 pages of updates.

The simulation world seems to be dividing itself up into two distinct types of users. There are people who look at a design and its challenges, think about relevant simulation technologies, what they could contribute, and do the work necessary to achieve those benefits. And there are people who follow the instructions of others, without too much regard to what’s actually going on. No problem there. In many ways it’s the only way we can roll out the benefits of simulation across an engineering enterprise effectively. But the point of this blog is that the skill sets and approaches of one workflow don’t work well in the other. And that mismatch is at its most obvious when we look at validation and people’s views on it.

In the run up to our annual user day I always wonder if people are actually going to turn up. Or even sign up. But sign up and turn up they did, and in a greater number than ever before. And the really gratifying thing was that attendees ranged from the usual SSA suspects, who we’ve known and worked closely with over the years (you know who you are..), all the way to people who have yet to take the big leap into Abaqus userdom.