Challenges:
A Stanford professor wanted to bring together the study of mechanical engineering and medicine to enable realistic human body modeling.
Solutions:
She and her Living Matter Laboratory use SIMULIA’s Abaqus software to combine the two disciplines by simulating personalized problems in the human body.
Benefits:
Personalized simulation allows for more precise analyses and predictions of human body dynamics and has great potential for both academic research and commercial development.
Times have changed dramatically in the world of engineering since the baby boomers were in college, especially as simulation has grown to become such an integral part of the design process. Slide rules, mechanical calculators, even meshing by hand are a thing of the past and current Millennial engineering students are inspired to push the boundaries of innovative technology ever further.
One Stanford University professor, Dr. Ellen Kuhl, is helping drive such innovation alongside her students in the Living Matter Laboratory. Her group works with 10 students using personalized finite element models to predict the interplay of form and function throughout the human body.
Dr. Kuhl has used SIMULIA’s Abaqus finite element analysis tool ever since she took her first finite element course at the Leibnitz University in Hanover, Germany—and her Living Matter Lab at Stanford follows suit. “I’ve been using Abaqus for 20 years now,” she says.
Following her studies of computational, civil, and aerospace engineering in Hanover, Stuttgart, and Delft, Dr. Kuhl became an assistant professor in the department of Mechanical Engineering at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern. In 2007 she moved to Stanford, where she is currently a professor in the department of mechanical engineering with courtesy appointments in bioengineering and cardiothoracic surgery. With a passion for living-matter physics, Dr. Kuhl focuses her work on the precise prediction of the response of living structures to environmental changes.
After she began her heart simulation work, Dr. Kuhl reached out to SIMULIA and asked if they would be interested in implementing biology into the software—without knowing that the Living Heart Project was already in the works. “As we had already developed similar software, we had some experience with it,” she says, “so the timing couldn’t have been better.”
Since then, the students in the Living Matter Lab have studied different parts of the human body, often using their own medical images. Attracted by the wide range of medical problems, students from multiple disciplines came on board. “The classes that we offer attract undergraduates who are future medical students, human biologists, and engineers,” says Kuhl. “There’s a broad mix of people and that’s what I like the most. I’ve even had some business and education students; what’s interesting is that when you show them a simulation, they have very different ideas than our engineering students.”
Watch this interview with Dr. Ellen Kuhl, Associate Professor at Stanford University
Want to learn more?
Discover how students in the Living Matter Lab leverage simulation to model the human body.
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