
Those were exciting times in 1996 when in the midst of my mechanical engineering at KREC Surathkal, I first heard about Finite Element Methods. It was glorified by my seniors as the cure-all, solve-all package to tackle ME challenges. I jumped the bandwagon and took up the elective and opted to do my final year project in it. After a miserable year of trying to learn FEM (no thanks to our Mathematics prof who handled the subject in the most mathematical way he could), I almost gave up on it! Yet the lure of FEM was so compelling that after my BE, I did a course at IISc (Indian Institute of Science) to clear things up for me and FEM was no longer the labyrinth of integrals.
Those days, it was difficult to ignore the penetration of FEM, I quickly moved from Bosch to GE to solve more challenges using FEM. It was during my initial stint at GE that I was drawn into the maze where FEM was equivalent to engineering! Everywhere I would see aircraft engines, generators, turbines and glossy magazines containing entire models of cars and engines in meshed form. I had arrived. It was a matrix like dream where everything around me was made of nodes and elements. Just a few clicks of the button, a few intelligent selection of elements, solvers, material properties and the world could be analyzed in ANSYS, NASTRAN and so on. In retrospect, (partly thanks to a few eye opening sessions with my engineering manager in GE Schenectady), I had forgotten why we were using FEM, just to find the stresses, displacements and natural frequencies of everything that we designed? Gone were the design handbooks, bending equations, formulae, Petersons stress concentrations! FEA could answer anything.
Actually I was just plain lucky (of course the hardwork also paid off). I was dealing with straight forward assemblies with isotropic material properties, small displacements, everything that spelled linear. The truth is that the world is non-linear. As weeks turned to months, my prjects became more complex and I realized that the FEA software we are using is just solving matrices and it was the brain sitting in front of the monitors that had to do the thinking, interpret the colourful post processing and most importantly identify and ignore singularities and outliers. And to do this, I had to anticipate the the solution. Back to pencil and book, I started with free body diagrams, bending and stress equations, basically refresh my "engineering" skills. "Simplify the problem, nature is not so complicated."
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