Enhancing Engineering Productivity

T he high level of technological innovation required for a strong national economy and defense is only achievable with a highly productive engineering workforce. In this country, the widely reported decline in the number of US students graduating in STEM disciplines strongly suggests that the US lead in innovation could be in jeopardy.1 Changing demographics in the US engineering workforce exacerbate this situation: many of the most highly skilled engineers in the US defense community are rapidly approaching retirement age, and replacing their skills is a huge challenge. This impact can be ameliorated by increasing engineering workforce productivity. Driven by US national defense needs2,3 in the 1940s and 1950s, computers were initially developed to increase the productivity of scientists and mathematicians engaged in decryption and cryptography, the design and testing of nuclear weapons, the computation of artillery firing tables, the design and testing of aerospace systems—including the Apollo Program—and many other defense related programs. The adoption of PCs and workstations in the 1980s and 1990s accelerated office and engineering productivity via word processors, spreadsheets, business enterprise data processing, and computer-aided design systems. More recently, sophisticated engineering tools such as Matlab (www. mathworks.com) and Nastran, (www.mscsoftware.com/product/msc-nastran) as well as multi-physics “linked” tools such as ANSYS (www.ansys.com) and Comsol (www. comsol.com), have continued to increase engineering workforce productivity. However, the exponential growth in the computing power of laptops and small clusters that has sustained the growth of this productivity is slowing down and saturating.4 Fortunately, help is on the way. The confluence of the growing power of supercomputers and the development and deployment of multi-effect, science-based computational engineering software applications (tools) is beginning to give us the ability—for the first time in human history—to make accurate predictions of the performance of many complex, full-scale systems. For instance, the US Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program engineering application HPCMP CREATE-Kestrel can accurately predict the flight performance of a fixed-wing jet aircraft, including the aerodynamics, structural dynamics, propulsion, control, and other effects that determine the flight characteristics (http://aem.eng.ua.edu/files/2015/01/ David-McDaniel-flyer.pdf). Similarly, Goodyear’s tire design tool treats all the major effects that determine tire performance for modern vehicles.5 Engineers now use validated tools like Kestrel and the Goodyear tire design tool to design and analyze fixedand rotary-winged aircraft and modern complex tires, ships, complex antenna systems, ground vehicles, nuclear reactors, and many other complex systems. New tools are continually being developed for many other systems.