Happy Friday, folks! This week’s roundup of interesting engineering technology news articles includes a look at battery development, the impact of coding over the past 30 years and monster trucks simulating earthquakes.
Enjoy!
- Tesla CEO Extends Help to Boeing on Battery Issue
- DesignCon Announces 2013 DesignVision Award Winners
- Monster Truck Shakes to Simulate Earthquake
- The Impact of Coding over 30 Years
- Accelerating Battery Development
Reuters
Tesla CEO Extends Help to Boeing on Battery Issue
Elon Musk, billionaire CEO of Tesla Motors Inc. and SpaceX wants to help Boeing with their recent 787 Dreamliner battery issues – so he took to Twitter to tell them:
“Desire to help Boeing is real & am corresponding w 787 chief engineer. Junod’s Esquire article had high fiction content” – @elonmusk
He thinks the battery packs that he uses at SpaceX and in his luxury electric cars could be the answer. Musk said that their lithium-ion battery packs in their space vehicles are subject to much higher loads than Boeing’s 787 Dreamliners and they’ve never had any issues with them.
Boeing declined to comment, but what do you think? Do you think Elon Musk has something to bring to the table here?
Microwave Journal
DesignCon Announces 2013 DesignVision Award Winners
ANSYS wins DesignCon’s 2012 DesignVision award in the Modeling and Simulation Tools category
UBM Tech has announced their 2013 DesignVision award winners, which were presented earlier this week at DesignCon 2013 in Santa Clara, CA. For the 2nd year in a row, ANSYS is proud to be among the award recipients – this year, ANSYS® HFSS
for ECAD integration with Cadence won in the modeling and simulation tools category and in 2012, ANSYS subsidiary Apache Design’s RTL Power Model technology was honored with an award as well.
These awards are meant to celebrate the achievements of the most innovative companies and their unique tools that support customer needs to improve and simplify the design process.
Winners were selected based on three criteria:
- How well the product met the market’s vision and offered unique insight into customer needs.
- The originality of the solution and if it offered a new approach to meeting market needs.
- The quality of the implementation and how well it fits the market requirements.
What’s cool is that this is particular functionality is one of the highlights in our recent 14.5 product release. A big CONGRATULATIONS to the ANSYS team for another successful year at DesignCon!
Mashable
Monster Truck Shakes to Simulate Earthquake
As an engineering simulation company, we are always interested to see how companies use simulation software to design the next big thing (even if it’s the Pet Rock). The U.S. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation developed the ultimate Tonka truck: T-Rex. This massive 64,000 pound vehicle literally shakes the ground to simulate an earthquake, providing information to researchers about the properties of rocks and sediments and how they react during an earthquake.
T-Rex will make a visit in Christchurch, New Zealand where a series of earthquakes in 2011 destroyed buildings and took lives to help engineers determine safe building techniques in the area in the event of other quakes.
Design News
The Impact of Coding over 30 Years
When a simulation is run, results are expected quickly with many possible outcomes. That wouldn’t be possible, however, without advanced high-performance computing. Over the past 30 years, computers and coding have evolved from giant machines that were extremely slow to small machines that operate with high memory providing almost instantaneous results.
Along with the hardware and software evolution, programming languages have come a long way. From BASIC and FORTRAN to C to C++ and Java, the internet and web browsing wouldn’t be where it is today with out these stepping stones.
Just think of how far the technology has come!
ChargedEVs
Accelerating Battery Development
Although this was printed in ChargedEVs Magazine in October, it has finally made it online and is a great read! As electric vehicles continue to stay on the forefront of energy saving, green energy discussions, consumers have been slow adopters. Experts think that a main cause of the slow purchase rate is due to expensive and limited batteries, and little progress has been made to improve the batteries or decrease the cost. However, two companies, (and we mean to pat ourselves on the back here) ANSYS and Wildcat Discovery Technologies are using very different techniques to develop better batteries.
We teamed with General Motors and ESim to provide battery simulations to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Computer Aided Engineering for Electric Drive Vehicle Batteries program to assist by shortening the design cycle while addressing the cost and energy density, but also life cycle, operating temperature and safety. Wildcat, meanwhile, developed proprietary methods for rapidly synthesizing energy-storage materials. This breakthrough allows Wildcat to synthesize energy storage materials up to 100 times faster than standard labs.
With these two great companies surging ahead in the electric vehicle battery market, electric vehicles could become more cost-effective to produce, resulting in lower prices for the end consumer.
The post This Week’s Top 5 Engineering Technology News Articles appeared first on ANSYS.