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Computational Engineering: why it may soon change everything
This article is by Pari Singh, Founder and CEO of The Engineering Company. They’re building a software platform that enables inventors and engineers to design hardware at the speed of their imagination.
Today, engineering design and validation mistakes repeatedly cost lives through component failures on airplanes and cars; and irreparable environmental damage through emissions scandals and preventable oil spills are just the start of our issues. Modern-day engineering has become slow, expensive and painful. What used to feel like invention, now feels like a grind. Our designs are now so complex, that industry needs to spend years and millions to deliver incremental updates.
At the same time, there’s so much to be excited about. We’re currently going through a generational move from Internal Combustion Engines to Sustainable Electric Vehicles, we are pushing to become a multi-planetary species, not to mention the advancements in renewable and clean energy.
Combine these needs, the hard push for new generations of products, and the rise of 3D printing, the maker community, cloud computing and mass customisation, and you can tell that we’re around the corner from a big change in the industry.
Computational Engineering:
Everyone knows that the industry is set for something big, and computational engineering design will be the spark that sets it all off.
Computational Engineering (CE) is a new approach to engineering design that massively increases the scale and complexity of designs that engineers are able to invent. Computational Engineering gives a single engineer the power to operate with the resource of a whole team, and gives teams the ability to invent things that we’ve never seen before. Computational Engineering will change the landscape of the industry, in ways we can’t begin to imagine, and it’s going to be very different from what anyone is currently imagining.
We’re entering a new era for engineering:
Some quick history: From the 1960s to the 2010s, industry fundamentally changed how engineering was done. As projects began to get more and more complex (think the early Ford Mustang to a modern-day Bugatti Veyron), our old approach of drawing on paper and calculating on blackboards no longer scaled. We needed to find a more scalable way of engineering.
To solve the problem of rising design complexity, we moved from Manual Engineering (doing work on pen and paper) to Digital Engineering (doing work on a computer). Same work, moved to software. We went from blackboards to spreadsheets, from drafting to CAD and from filing cabinets to SharePoint.
With each one of these changes, we found the joys of digitisation. We could make designs parametric, we could instantly share and collaborate on ideas and replicate designs at zero cost. This move enabled the modern world as we know it. Modern-day products, like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 or the Airbus A380 are so complex, that they would be nearly impossible to design using pen and paper.
Over the last 20 years, the complexity of our products has continued to increase at an exponential rate. And it’s not just complexity in a single engineering domain, but lots of different domains (Mechanical, Structural, Electrical, Aerodynamic, Chemical, etc.) that are all deeply intertwined. On top of this, regulation is becoming more restrictive, standards are getting tighter, and people expect higher quality products for less money.
What this means is that there is exponentially more work to do, and not exponentially more people. This makes engineering today extremely hard and painful. It’s now so expensive and time-consuming to design and engineer things, that we’re forced to work overtime just to keep up with the design revisions, iterations and constant changes in spec. Once again, the tools that we use to design products are barely keeping up, leaving the burden on engineers to work harder, to miss more family events, and to push to the limits of our endurance, instead of allowing us to work smarter.
Right now, the industry is going through another transition. It’s a more subtle transition than the shift from Manual work to Digital work, but the impact will be hundreds of times larger. It won’t just change what we can design, but will fundamentally change how we design.
The transition is from Digital Engineering to Computational Engineering.
So what is Computational Engineering?
Computational Engineering means that rather than doing the work manually, the computer does the work for you.
This means that the computer works as an ally to the engineer rather than an obstruction that needs to be fought. With Computational Engineering, the computer does a lot (if not all) of the heavy lifting; calculations, geometry generation and design validation. Even better, the computer does this in the background, letting the engineer focus on what Engineers do best: creating new ideas, exploring different designs, and solving engineering problems.
In effect, there’s an little army of incredibly fast and powerful workers inside the computer, doing your bidding. Unlike with generative design or solvers, engineers — the inventors — are in control of the process, not the computer.
The transition from Digital Engineering to Computational Engineering will affect all three pillars of engineering: design, validation and manufacture.
We will move from manually drawing pictures of our ideas in CAD, to defining what we want: the computer will do all of the manual execution work in generating the CAD for us.
We will move from setting up and running simulations manually to telling the computer what we want to verify: the computer will set up, run, interpret the simulation results, and suggest changes to improve the design.
We will move from manually programming CNC toolpaths, creating set-up sheets and work instructions, to automated machining and 3D printing.
With all of the manual execution work done by the computer, engineers will get to focus on the engineering work that matters — the invention.
Same story, other industries
Although this transition sounds scary, it’s very natural. It’s happened in almost every other field of creative design and enabled much of the modern world: Software Development, Gaming, Animation, VFX, and IC Chip Design.
It’s always the same story — we do stuff manually on pen and paper, which works for some time, but then complexity rises and it becomes too difficult to continue. We then move to Phase 2 — the digitisation phase, where we take the old, trusted process and move it to software, making the process smoother and more efficient. This second phase means that we can dare to make even more complex products until again, it becomes too complex and hard until we move into Phase 3: the Computational Era.
Programing languages, modern video game engines, animation engines and chip design are all Phase Three industries. Today, Engineering Design is moving from Phase Two to Phase Three.
This is a fundamental change in how we do things and it’s hard to imagine how much of an impact it will have on the industry: Just like it’s hard to explain to game designers from the Pong and Mario era, the impact that Games Engines would have in bringing us to the modern Call of Duty era.
The shift into Phase 3 for Engineering Design will enable cities on Mars, massively more complex robotics, and will eventually enable us to design and build the Starship Enterprise.
But have no doubt: this is just the start.
What happens to Engineers?
A common mistake is to think that if the computers are now doing the work, engineers become less valuable, or get fired — it is, in fact, the complete opposite.
Engineers do not get automated away — engineers get superpowers.
The secret is that the role of the engineer changes, from the executor (1st person mode) to the architect (3rd person mode): the computer becomes the executor. The way we typically do this is by programming, but programming doesn’t need to be scary, ugly, or even code-based. Like any transition, we need to learn new tools, but those who do early will set the pace for what is to come.
Another implication of the role change is that it massively lowers barriers to entry. Today a 10-year-old kid can create a new python script, write 100 easy lines of code and pull libraries from Github to design an app, a game or a neural net in hours, while the computer generates the millions of 1’s and 0’s for them in an instant. What would have taken a team of world-leading punch card operators and computer scientists a year to do in the 1950s, is now a 10-year-old kid and one hour.
For inventors, this gives them the ability to create new products and compete with the major players with a fraction of their resource. The result today, in every industry that’s shifted from Phase 2 to Phase 3, is a new wave of inventors, technologies, products and companies, and it will be no different for Engineering.
Why now?
Surprisingly, Computational Engineering has been operating quietly at the fringes for quite some time — people all over the industry have been using their own little hacks for the best part of 20 years. We’ve all heard of the people in our organisations that scripted their way out of doing big chunks of repetitive work. Or the engineer that builds Python loops to design product variants or automate simulation, letting the computer do their day job overnight. Computational Engineering in some shape or form has been happening at the fringes for two decades, ever since CAD and simulation packages opened up their API’s.
So if little pockets of engineering are converting, so why is it so important for the bulk of the industry to move over now?
Today, design and validation mistakes cause aeroplane failures and repeatedly cost lives, and emissions scandals and preventable oil spills are just a fraction of the tragic consequences poor engineering design can have. In addition, companies are now facing new economic realities with rock bottom oil and gas prices, a shrinking global market and consumers that want the best but don’t want to pay for it
I’m lucky enough to speak to lots of different industries, and I hear the same stories over and over, engineering costs are too high, we’re behind schedule, and companies need new processes to simply keep up. It’s hard to make ends meet with the current approach, and company after company face existential threats.
At the same time, there’s so much to be excited about. We’re diving into a new era for aerospace and automotive, with companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Tesla pushing the envelope of what’s possible. We’re currently going through a generational move from Internal Combustion Engines to Sustainable Electric Vehicles, and we’re pushing to become a multi-planetary species.
Combine these needs, the hard push for new generations of products, the rise of 3D printing, the maker community, cloud computing and mass customisation, and it’s clear that we’re around the corner from a big change in the industry.
We must find ways not just to keep up, but to push forwards and design the things that make humanity better. On the fringes, we’ve already found ways to work unbelievably efficiently, leveraging computers to help engineers do more.
Although the hacks we’ve found are thousands of times more powerful than traditional methods, they are incredibly inaccessible, hard to use and highly specific.
They require us to learn hard software engineering languages, to program using terrible CAD API’s, and to use inconsistent macros. Although modern startups and cutting edge companies have in house automation efforts, this approach is too hard and too painful for everyday engineers.
It’s now more important than ever that we take the idea behind all of our hacks, and find a way to make it accessible for every engineer, every hobbyist and every 10 year old kid in the world. This is a tooling problem.
The rise of the open-source engineering design:
There’s one final piece to every successful transition — the open-source community.
The open-source community helps proliferate innovation, invention and education throughout an industry. Without open-source, we would not have Linux, Android, most cloud technologies, and hundreds of thousands of games. Without video tutorials and content, there would be a fraction of the number of self-taught engineers. In these industries, most new projects today (both hobbyist and enterprise) are built using open-source technologies and Engineering Design will be no different.
The industry is always responsible for products and services, but often the open-source community invents, shares and standardises the core infrastructure we all build on.
The Engineering Company
At The Engineering Company, we know how important it is for this transition to happen now.
TEC was founded to accelerate the industry to transition to Computational Engineering — what typically takes a generation, we believe can happen in a matter of years. We’re building the first easy and intuitive design tool for engineers, the underlying technologies that enable it, the first sets of libraries and tutorials to get us started, and of course, we’re laying the seeds for the open-source community to thrive.
If we’re able to build the right tools and make them easy and accessible, we have a chance to permanently change the course of our industry, and perhaps even the human race.
If you want to be connected to others that share our vision of the future — then join our community. We will be hosting regular meet-ups to discuss. Join the community here!
If you share our vision of the future and want to help us lay the foundation of the open-source community or use the tool before anyone else, email me at: contact@theengineeringcompany.com
Disclaimer; This is a short introduction to computational engineering. I have been making generalisations and oversimplifying in this post to communicate the core idea. I’ll be going into more detail in future posts.
BACKED is the human-centric European VC fund. We’re a proud investor in the The Engineering Company — we think Pari and his team are going to kill CAD and revolutionise engineering design and manufacturing. No biggy.
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