Abstract

Digital transformation is impacting every industry - automotive, agriculture, logistics, healthcare and manufacturing, to name a few. Concurrently, digital technologies are increasingly being used in high schools, colleges and universities for in-person and remote learning. While, in the past, engineering education coupled classroom lectures with experiments in physical laboratories, in the future, lectures will be a blend of brick and mortar classroom teaching augmented by online resources and engineering simulation tools. Laboratory experiments, design projects and physical prototyping will be complemented by simulation and software based experiential learning. While traditional engineering simulation tools such as the leading CFD, CSM and CEM packages are extremely accurate and capable of detailed modeling, they are not as easy to use, particularly for undergraduate or high school students. Hence, our team has developed a simulation tool called Ansys Discovery that introduces designers and undergraduate students to the art and practice of simulation, allowing them to create concepts leading to designs, as well as perform design space exploration while learning the underlying physics and simulation principles. The main breakthroughs have been in achieving an unprecedented level of usability and the high performance computing capacity of GPUs. While the simulation tools in the past were generally restricted to run on engineering workstations, on powerful personal computers, or on university servers, with Ansys Discovery it is possible to get near-instantaneous results utilizing the capabilities of GPUs on the local machine or on the Cloud. Ansys Discovery's capabilities are supported by digital learning system (online courses with simulation tools provided on the cloud) allowing students around the world to be trained in the most complex engineering disciplines. In this talk, we will provide details of the underlying technologies and methods that are suitable for meeting the evolving needs of the many millions of engineering and STEM students by providing educators and students with high quality education assets and simulation tools accessible to everyone.