PANEL SESSION - FUTURE-DIRECTIONS FOR COMMERCIAL FINITE-ELEMENT SOFTWARE

Many industries have outsourced an ever increasing number of activitie s in recent years in order to downsize their operations. As a conseque nce, there has been growing reliance on commercial codes rather than p roprietary in-house software. Global competitiveness has encouraged re duction of lead-time between concept and production. A key factor in t his strategy is the effective use of commercial finite element softwar e to perform a variety of realistic physical simulations in order to s ignificantly reduce the amount of necessary physical prototyping. This panel will focus on hardware, software and algorithmic approaches to speed-up and/or improve the realism of physical simulations with comme rcial packages. Typical applications areas include crashworthiness mod eling, computational fluid dynamics modeling (both aerodynamic and com bustion models), noise-vibration-harshness models and manufacturing pr ocesses. This session is represented here with biographical sketches o f the panel participants, individual reflections on the panel theme, a nd a list of related Internet references. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Lt d. All rights reserved.