In Prof. Patrick Smolinski's University of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania, USA) classroom, it's never too early to acquire proficiency with the tools of the engineering trade. In his introductory engineering courses, freshmen in the University of Pittsburgh's engineering department are assigned an analysis project that requires them to analyze a part, factoring in estimated loading conditions and the part's material properties. The project requires them to perform the analysis using our academic DesignSpace capability. Within the next few years, the University of Pittsburgh intends to teach fully 80 % its incoming engineering students to use ANSYS DesignSpace.
This past year, one of Prof. Smolinski's teams ("The Intellectual Misfits"), comprised of students Dhaval Mehta, Jon Puff, Nick Legge, and Gary Lloyd, conducted an analysis to determine whether, under specified loading, the subject part, a real-world bike crank, would suffer stress failure. ANSYS DesignSpace is an ideal teaching tool in the undergraduate engineering environment because it is easy to use but does not sacrifice analytic robustness. It rises to meet users' degrees of expertise through the broad availability of intuitive wizards and knowledge-based automation.
The Intellectual Misfits used an existing bicycle crank design as the subject of their simulation. The design was given to them as a SolidWorks 3-D model, and the team ran their ANSYS DesignSpace embedded within the SolidWorks CAD application. (As a separate component of the assignment, teams were also required to create from scratch a model of an actual bike crank in SolidWorks, using hand measurements.) Once they had the model set up for ANSYS DesignSpace, they then selected the desired material. The team chose a titanium alloy due to its low weight and extraordinary strength, crucial properties in bicycle applications, in which minimizing weight and maintaining structural rigidity and integrity are essential to effective design.
Prof. Smolinski believes the early introduction of computer-aided engineering (CAE) in an engineer's education is highly productive. "Students do the same work as professional engineers," he said, "design and analyze a component." He also thinks highly of ANSYS DesignSpace. "Advanced computer-aided engineering tools like ANSYS DesignSpace make it easy for engineering students to design complex components," he continued. "The students found it very easy to mesh and analyze the bike crank."
In every aspect of our lives, computers are becoming more and more prevalent, both as tools to streamline existing processes and also to find novel solutions to old problems. Today's engineering students (as well as their prospective colleagues in industry) are more computer literate than any class that preceded them. With CAE's broad acceptance among the professional ranks of engineers, it is presently desirable, and may soon become entirely necessary, that students gain significant exposure to simulation software during their undergraduate educations. Prof. Smolinski and the University of Pittsburgh are doing their parts to ensure that this happens with the support of ANSYS, Inc.