Do you go to your primary care physician when you need open heart surgery?

Probably no. What a stupid question!

But more and more service providers from the design environment are now also doing simulations. The systems are becoming easier and easier to use and systems integrated in CAD hardly cost anything.

And since the calculation is so easy, one also does the distribution of software, develops components, takes care of the production, is a "specialist" for this and for that, just for the entire belly store.

I was at the NAFEMS seminar in Bamberg at the end of April. I could hardly believe my eyes and ears when Erke Wang from CADFEM announced that it would be best to start right away with multiphysics and put everything into the simulation that is feasible at the state of the art (excuse me.... software development).

What is there against it?

Unfortunately, in practice I encounter more and more "calculations" that are not worth the paper on which the nice colorful pictures are printed.

Good calculations are still a supreme discipline in my eyes. Just because more and more people can operate the software does not increase the quality of what is done with it.

The opposite is much more the case....

A calculation engineer should be able to reproduce his results at least in the range of factor 2 or better, equipped with paper and calculator.

University graduates, including those with doctorates, fail miserably at the simplest tasks, e.g. sketching the bending moment curve of a 3-column beam or estimating by how much a geometric bar of aluminum behaves in relation to a structurally identical bar of steel.

What great "calculation results" are rolling towards us, if now multiphysics tasks (coupled calculations, e.g. flow structure) are calculated by laymen, who are not able to understand the simplest static results.

That's why we decided to do computation from the very beginning. And there we want to be the best. Not hiring employees, selling software, designing components and doing calculations on the side!

After all, you don't go to the family doctor when you need open-heart surgery. Or do you????

In this case, I prefer to go to a specialist who does it every day.

Your Stefan Merkle