Computer-aided engineering (CAE)

Computer-aided engineering has been successfully used for product engineering for decades. Along with that, there was a continuous development for both high-fidelity modeling approaches and more pragmatic ones that let you obtain sufficiently accurate results faster. Today, engineers can and must choose the level of accuracy that best fits their needs to answer engineering questions with minimum computational effort. The level of accuracy ranges from high-fidelity modeling techniques that enable the prediction of real behavior within a few percent or even less to quick methods that enable quick trend predictions.

Today, on that basis certification and verification processes for CAE tools are well established. They will remain a critical ingredient to the progress of CAE, its reliability and trust in digital twins and its establishment in novel areas. While predictive simulation will continuously reduce the need for expensive measurements and prototyping, it will continue to require rigorous CAE methods and best practices validation through experiment.

Learning CAE requires time, dedication, thorough study and practice. It is critical to understand the underlying fundamental physics of the domain you're in, have a grasp on numerical methods and their limitations, as well as practice the hands-on usage of actual CAE software tools. Thanks to automation, increasing computing power and ever-continuous improvement of user interfaces in modern CAE software, the barriers to high-fidelity CAE will further decrease across all user levels - shifting the scope to exploring results and making simulation-based decisions. What is more, it is critical to understand fundamental physical dynamics taking place to judge the results and make meaningful engineering decisions based on CAE results.

CAE software is used in a wide range of engineering applications whenever there is a need to understand or predict how various kinds of physics will affect the performance of a product design or system. In industrial product development, computer-aided engineering has progressed now to simulating the multiphysics behavior in complex geometries enabling companies to fully understand and optimize their product design virtually before ever building a prototype.

Industries, where computer-aided engineering is widely used, include:

• Aerospace
• Automotive
• Consumer products
• Marine (ship design, propulsion systems, engine design)
• Electronics
• Energy (Nuclear, Oil & Gas, Power generation)
• Building services
• Life sciences
• Turbomachinery
• Sports
• Other general applications involving structures, vibrations, electromagnetics, sound, heat and fluid flow

CAD is the use of computer programs to create, modify, analyze and document two- or three-dimensional (2D or 3D) graphical representations of physical objects as an alternative to manual drafts and product prototypes. CAD is focused just on the geometry of a part or product.

Computer-aided engineering is really the next step in the development process, and allows engineers to simulate the part or product defined in CAD to understand if the design will perform as expected to meet requirements. CAD data feeds the CAE process, where engineers using CAE tools create a simulation model based on the geometry defined in CAD. Results from the simulation then let engineers know if the design meets requirements or fails and come up with ideas to change the design to improve performance.

CAD together with CAE is an iterative process that allows engineering teams to more quickly develop innovative new products in less time than physical testing methods that rely on building real prototypes.