A Virtual Door to the Real world





A Virtual Door to the Real world Date: Friday , August 01, 2014 Rafiq Somani, Country Sales Manager, ANSYS India Harshad R. Karve, Technical Director, Asia, Kaustubh Nande,Country Marketing Head Founded in 1970, ANSYS (ANSS) is a provider of reliable engineering simulation softwares. ANSYS has more than 75 strategic sales locations throughout the world with a network of channel partners in 40+ countries. The company has a current market cap of $ 6.98 billion. Historically, the process of product development has been complicated, elongated and costly. Be it any product, it has to pass through different vigorous tests and fulfill various compliances based on its nature. Some of the high end safety critical equipments like cars, aircrafts, engines and many others require meticulous and painstaking testing to ensure that they are safe, feasible and ready for the user. Many of these safety critical equipment manufacturers spend billions in this process as it demands building several prototypes, testing them under various pressures, going back and redesigning, making improvements in the design, re-build the prototypes, test them again and the process continues till the product is ready to go to market. The whole process consumes so much time, money and energy that the product might even become obsolete and the competitors might take over. It becomes even more critical when it comes to things like nuclear power plants and large wind turbines that cost billions of dollars. Keep on building prototypes and testing them may lead businesses lose huge amounts of money in testing. Simulation can be a great strategic tool to avoid this. Rewinding back three decades ago, it was a dream to have something real getting into the virtual world of computer and understanding how it would work. Putting in simple words, computer aided simulation is a mathematical version of the real world. CAD (Computer Aided Design) initially made its mark with non moving objects. But today simulation is something where we see how things work. For instance, we can see if a phone drops from a certain height or an angle, what kind of damages can occur and what kind of improvement in the design can be made to ensure minimum or no damage. So the key value for the businesses is that they don\'t have to keep on building physical prototypes to test their products on different parameters. Through CAD, they can actually build virtual prototypes and test them for all types of conditions. They can do it repetitively for various conditions rather than few times with physical prototypes. This gives them a large room for making improvements in the design of the product and improving it to the maximum. Businesses can even perform virtual tests in zero gravity which is hard to do otherwise. There are various kinds of analysis to make sure a product is structurally sound and durable. These things become important especially while designing components that go into engines of automotive plants. Some big companies have plants and big machineries working round the clock for years with probably one or two shut downs an year. For such cases, it is important to make sure that all the parts that are undergoing lots of thermal pressures, varying temperatures, can actually survive. CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) can be used for different physical streams and can aid significantly in achieving such objectives. Apart from structural engineering, it can also be used in electronics and fluid dynamics. Reliability of Computer Aided Simulation Ansys has a very strong academia and collaboration with all major universities who are doing research relevant to CAE. Our simulation products use vast number of complicated equations. For each of the physics, there are different equations which we keep validating by series of validation tests for each of our releases. This is how we keep updating ourselves and our products to the latest developments in the research and as the new commercial standards emerge. We do not claim 100 percent accuracy but it might go over 90 percent in certain applications. Ansys is the only technology that has dived deep into all three physics- Structure, Fluid Flow, and Electronics. In any kind of organization, be it NASA, military labs around the world, Indian research labs, all the top automotive companies, they will somehow be using any one physics application. Roadmap for India Indian companies need to be little more daring and bullish about being more innovative. We are good if we are given a problem to solve. We don\'t have a product of ours but we are into development. Indians can come out with the best solutions at minimum cost. Though India has opened up itself in the last two decades, the next big need would be more and more IP creation. India has been an excellent manufacturing hub for the rest of the world but now is the time to develop a strong eco-system where innovation is encouraged. We need to bring quality in our education and engage into research to take bold steps towards technological advancements. In the Days to Come Ansys has the legacy of developing software that allows engineers to develop fantastic products. We are trying to meet lot of senior executives and educate them that CAE can be a great strategic tool for them. In the years to come, we wish to double our revenues changing our go to market strategy and also scale to the bottom line to SMBs. We are sure with the value that we bring to our customers, achieving our own objective will not be a difficult task. (As told to Pankaj Kundwani)