Recently, SIMULIA introduced the 2020 SIMULIA Champions, the inaugural team of brand ambassadors whose expertise and passion position them to advance the future of simulation technology. In this series of blogs, we will be getting to know some of our individual SIMULIA Champions, finding out more about their history – and future – with the technology.
Alice Lin is a Simulation Specialist R&D at GN Audio, a company that offers audio solutions such their Resound hearing aid line and Jabra brand of headsets, speakers, and other commercial electronic products. Lin never expected to work with audio equipment; her background is in aircraft design, but when she relocated with her husband the position at GN presented itself.
“After I joined I really liked the company culture,” says Lin. “It makes me feel very comfortable and I can focus on the technology. I don’t need to spend too much time worrying about other things. This company, they also respect the technical specialists.”
When she first began working for GN, which recently celebrated its 150th anniversary, Lin was the only employee working with mechanical simulation, though others used radio frequency (RF) simulation. She became something of a simulation pioneer within her workplace, and is now responsible for a small simulation team that she helped to hire.
Lin works mainly with Abaqus, combining simulation with user experience to ensure that headphones and other products are comfortable to wear as well as functional. She and her team are using simulation to design the products before physical prototypes are made, which saves both time and money.
“Before we used Abaqus for simulation, the job was really very tough,” Lin remarks. “They only can make user tests after they get the samples. But once you have a sample, it means the design has already been fixed. It’s very, very difficult to make a design change. Then you need to spend a lot of money to make tooling modifications, and the most terrible thing is that you actually don’t have a clear direction about how to change it. Sometimes the users’ feeling is subjective, so it’s really difficult to evaluate the level of comfort…This is not only a simple simulation. We need to combine simulation with the human data, and a lot of knowledge related with comfort…Our product is becoming more and more comfortable, and we are spending less and less time on the design of the headband.”
Lin’s background in engineering goes back to her interest in mathematics and physics starting in middle school.
“In our small town, the adults said that girls are not good at learning physics and mathematics,” she reflects. “But I said ‘I can do that,’ so I started to learn solid mechanics in my university.”
Lin went on to earn a Master’s Degree in solid mechanics from Tsinghua University. Her career began with aircraft design (where she used CATIA frequently), and the shift to audio equipment introduced her to situations and challenges both new and familiar.
“I think I can even borrow some experience from my previous work,” Lin says. “It is more mature to use simulation in the aircraft industry, but in this headset industry…it’s a big challenge that also brings some opportunity. You can use simulation to solve a lot of issues that no one has solved before.”
SIMULIA is pleased to welcome Alice Lin into the 2020 SIMULIA Champions program, and excited to continue working with her in the future. Stay tuned to the blog to learn more about our other 2020 SIMULIA Champions.
And be sure to connect with Alice on the SIMULIA Learning Community by checking out her profile.
SIMULIA offers an advanced simulation product portfolio, including Abaqus, Isight, fe-safe, Tosca, Simpoe-Mold, SIMPACK, CST Studio Suite, XFlow, PowerFLOW and more. The SIMULIA Learning Community is the place to find the latest resources for SIMULIA software and to collaborate with other users. The key that unlocks the door of innovative thinking and knowledge building, the SIMULIA Learning Community provides you with the tools you need to expand your knowledge, whenever and wherever.
