Guest Blog by Jon Wiening, SIMULIA Product Manager from the 2010 SCC

As a member of the SIMULIA HQ staff located in Providence, Rhode Island, I am proud to be able to finally show off our home city for the first time to our customers and partners attending the 2010 SCC.  The Rhode Island Convention Center has turned out to be an ideal location for the conference with great flow from room to room, perfect sizing, and a great overall location (read: across the street from the Trinity Brew House, my favorite local watering hole).  Also making me proud has been how interesting all of the presentations have been.  It has not been a challenge to stay awake, even after lunch and a few huge chocolate chip cookies.

The day started out with ExxonMobil giving an expansive view of their 30 year journey of using Abaqus simulation from the 80’s to the present.  Many people familiar with Abaqus know about the strong relationship between SIMULIA and ExxonMobil, but this presentation added perspective, giving a sense of the range of engineering problems for which they rely on Abaqus simulation technologies including sealing properties of threaded connectors, reservoir modeling, structural analysis of ships, as well as understanding the effect of iceberg gouging on the ocean floor and buried piping.

While icebergs carving up the sea floor is pretty amazing, the life sciences presentations tend to provide some of the best eye candy.  Watching Abaqus/Explicit simulate a prosthetic lens being rolled up into a tube and injected into an eyeball had no problem holding the audience’s interest.

And after personally attending more than ten presentations over the past two days, it is noteworthy how widely represented Abaqus/Explicit is in the conference papers this year. A substantial percentage of the sustomer papers are showing off what Explicit can do, and with impressive and highly accurate results.  Customers have certainly become very comfortable using both Abaqus/Standard and Abaqus/Explicit, selecting the right tool for the job.

With customers becoming so comfortable with the range and robustness of Abaqus simulation technology, it now seems only natural that the new sessions on Simulation Lifecycle Management and Isight for simulation process automation and design optimization have been standing-room-only throughout the conference.  As Kyle Indermuehle put it, “an engineer’s time should be spent on engineering, not text editing.”  SIMULIA now boasts products that take care of many of the repetitive tasks and let engineers focus on engineering.  Read the press announcement on Isight 4.5 that we released during the conference to learn more about this valuable solution.

The final presentation of the day was the highly anticipated Abaqus 6.10 overview and demo, which showed off the new CFD capabilities and many enhancements of the new release. The audience licked their chops and dreamed of playing working with the new release when they get back to their desks.

Enjoy the video from Day 2 of the SCC,

Jon