[Podcast] Why is the job of the FEA engineer so challenging?

I share a lot of written articles, and sometimes videos also… but it’s been some time I am thinking to record also a “Podcast”, so today I made a first try to hopefully launch the discussion on an extremely important topic…FEA Simulation & Product innovation.

So Here’s the topic of today’s discussion:

Why is FEA simulation so challenging?

First I wouldn’t say that’s a FEA simulation is truly « difficult » because once you understand how it works, it actually make a lot of sense and it is very  systematic

So you can totally succeed in your FEA simulation very easily once you understand how it works

Now I didn’t say it’s not challenging

They are still a lot of challenges inside FEA Simulation…

But why is there so many challenges to do FEA Simulation?

What you must understand is that FEA simulation is a tool used by engineers to help companies to solve bigger problems

So, for example, companies don’t have everything figured out…

1- Products may have problems

They have products, they have parts that they are producing and designing and… They also have many problems with those parts ;-)

To give you an example, some of the those parts may be breaking earlier than they should or maybe they may have fissures inside that are causing a fair amount of problems for some of the clients

2. Companies may want to innovate and create WHOLE NEW products

A second case scenario would be a company who want to build new products while they have no idea what will be the performance of the new product compared with the old product

Those are all big problems that companies have

What is the job of the engineer in all this?

The job of the engineer is to consider those problems and to tell the company basically  if it will be possible to do the things they want to do or to solve the current issues.

And if yes it is indeed possible… how?

Which kind of method would make those projects feasible ?

And sometimes the job of the engineer is simply to tell them if this is possible to do…

Because you know there is a big difference between people who know engineering and an science and people who don’t know that

What do engineers know and non-scientific people ignore?

People who are engineer understand the Physical Laws and they understand that some things are too difficult to make or simply impossible to create in terms of material, in terms of a lot of aspects…

The people who are in business want a lot of things…they may want of course all the best stuff to have something to compete against other companies.

The problem is that most of the things they want are impossible to make…

Here’s a very funny video you can watch which describes very well what happens inside some companies… (It is purposely exaggerated, but though…)

The job of the engineer is just to tell them if the system can be made, how and to give them some kind of help in the roadmap to either diagnose the problems on the currents parts, to tell them if they will be able to release those new parts in the future…

So you see that the job of the engineer here is to invent something, to create something new that doesn’t have a solution right now

And this is why it’s so challenging because if we had a solution well you wouldn’t need to analyze all this because you would already have some answers, right?

You wouldn’t have to provide help either for the decision

Companies wants to do new things and this is why the job of the engineer is so important because engineers are creators, builders, who are thinking about what will be the next step in the future and what will be the new products that will come!

And it’s challenging because we don’t know, basically…

We don’t know what innovation means….

Innovation starts with Ignorance

This morning I was reading a very interesting article from Elon Musk about innovation and he was telling something really interesting (as usual) about innovation:

“Innovation starts with ignorance because it’s never been done before“

Here’s the article:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/art-ignorance-innovation-peter-hinssen/

So it’s is quite funny but you know I never thought about that but it is true because when you want to innovate it’s because you are thinking about something that doesn’t exist yet…

And so you are starting with ignorance

You don’t know what you want to discover… you don’t know what you want to create and that’s why that’s so difficult to assess what would be the impact of what you want to create!

But that’s also why the job of mechanical and design engineer are so interesting because you have a lot of potential to create very very good devices and products which will change the world and help other people to do things that they are not able to do right now!

So That’s why I like very much FEA Simulation and I think FEA is really really good because it helps the engineers to do all those things faster and better!

———–

That’s all basically for this article…

I could talk much more about this topic but I think you understand my meaning and I think that you also have your own ideas about this…

If you want to share about your ideas, please just write what you think in the comments and let me know

Thank you so much for reading! (or listening)

–Cyprien