I Live in Iowa: Week 32

I am so fortunate! On the whole 2011 has been a phenomenal year for me. I have expanded my capabilities and accomplishments in just about every area that I work on, with the exception being climbing. I'm doing it, life that is. I'm engineering and saving the company money by making things lighter and I am making things stronger by identifying weak areas. On Tuesday this week I realized at the end of the day that I ran about six different FEA iterations trying to improve this one area. I realized that in the past running six different concepts would be impossible. The resources to build a machine, gage it, test it, and evaluate the data takes at least weeks and often months. Additionally it costs a lot of money. I was able to do six iterations in one day. That's not even impressive, it's just that I happened to count instead of trying a dozen or more iterations as I have in the past.

I "worked" 44 hours this week including two hours on Sunday and 16 hours on Thursday and Friday of paid holiday. I have been wanting to come in on the weekend for a while but with marathon training and cross country meets I have been otherwise occupied. I again worked on the Disk Saw Felling Head all week. It is such an interesting piece of equipment. The thing that it reminds me of the most is thrust vectoring on jets. Although, it's probably more like landing gear. Regardless, it's a complex dynamic system.

I ran a measly 53 miles including a terrible 6k tempo. The worst I have had in at least eight months. I think there is a plethora of things that have happened to cause me a running setback. I had an amazing month of training in October. It was great. Then my grandma died. Then I had a few little lower leg pains. Put them together and I think you get some terrible running. I feel this is the way that I am being told to take it easy. My life goes in cycles. Things go well, I want more, then I crash, I recover and reevaluate my life, then I repeat the process again. I think that these setbacks will help me be more rested and ready for my marathon. Regardless of the outcome of the race I know that my trip to California will be good.

The UD kids had the week off of school so I did not coach. Do kids go to school at all any more? A week off here a month off there. I'll go be a teacher just for the four months off every year.

What else? Does the world repeat 80 year economic cycles? I am just struck by the similarities between the 1930s and now. On the one hand, we can not find finite element structural analysis engineers and there are help wanted signs all over Dubuque, but unemployment is still high. I don't know what is going to happen. It is certainly interesting.

http://spiraldates.com/?p=575

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_supercycle

http://steadfastfinances.com/blog/2010/08/16/spooky-similarities-between-1930-2010-stock-market/

This World Keeps Changing

This was an interesting week. On October 5th Steve Jobs died. I know he had survived pancreatic cancer and a liver transplant, but it just seemed like he wouldn't die, at least anytime soon. People are beginning to wonder about the possible demise of Apple. I think that they put so much work into defining what made Jobs so distinctive that for the next several years, probably the next decade, they have nothing to worry about. Secondly, I can't help but think of the movie Tron or Batman how the son inherits the company. Who knows what the future will hold?

The iPhone 4S came out. It's cool because it has HSPA+ (3x faster data speeds), a better processor (up to 7X faster graphics), an amazing camera, up to 64GB of storage, and to top it all off it has this new thing called Siri which people don't really know what to do with yet.

Unemployment is still high, yet we can not find engineers! There are three open positions in our group for finite element structural analysis engineers for people with 1+ year experience and a salary of $70K+ that have been on the website for a month yet only 12 people have applied, and one is me and one is my coworker who sits behind me and we are just looking for a promotion.

Secondly, I hear about the booming oil and gas fracking industry throughout the midwest and tales of 2% unemployment where someone can find a job they day they arrive in town. Do you really want a job? Go to North Dakota.

On the European economic front they are having problems. We spent so much money, for so long that now it is time to pay it back. Let me tell you from experience it is fun getting into debt, but paying your way out of it is not easy. I am making more money now than I ever have but my standard of living is barely higher than it was in college. I sleep on an air mattress! (It is a double tall queen size.)

This is such an interesting time to be alive! I will be able to say that I watched the world go from no cell phones or Internet to ubiquitous cell phones with the Internet. We went from some of the greatest peace and prosperity to a 10 year old war and a long running recession and very slow recovery.

By the way, stocks on Wall Street have been up and down huge percentages recently (10% per day in some cases) and the more volatile stocks are in general the more money those in the market stand to make. If for no other reason that people are buying and selling and Fidelity, among others, is making a commission on each transaction. In other words, billionaires get richer and unemployed people in their 40s and 50s still can't find jobs.

I Live in Iowa: Week 24

What a nice week! Like I've said, I have a great life. I worked 43 hours, mostly due to 9.5 on Friday. Work is going well. I am working on a project for one of the new forestry machines and due to the finite element analysis that I did, they will probably save 90kg (200 pounds)! This is important because this is a moving assembly on the working end of a machine. Which means that one pound from this assembly is worth perhaps five pounds from a less critical part of the assembly. It is an exciting prospect to be part of a team that is using the full range of tools available to us to make a product that will better fulfill the customer needs than what we currently make. Our current models are industry leaders by the way.

I ran 87 miles, after six consecutive weeks at 100 or more I needed some down time. I was tired. I did wrap up the month of September with 447 miles, one of my better months. I had three workouts this week. Monday I tried to solo a sub 16 5k on the indoor track at the University of Dubuque, but I was hitting 77s and a 78 and 79 so I stepped off after 2400 in 7:47, three seconds slow. Then I did some 800s and 400s and a hard hard 200 to get 5k of work in 15:53, which is okay. It's not what I wanted, but it's better than just 2400 of work. Thursday I did 10x2 minutes hard, 1 minute easy for a total of 29 minutes. I ran that with M my marathon training partner on Thursday afternoon at the Dubuque City high school meet. The former coach at Loras College (M's alma mater) is now the coach at Dubuque Senior High thus the connection. Plus I know a sophomore that runs for "Senior", as they call it around here. Then Friday, feeling good enough for another workout I did a seven mile progression on the heritage trail with the last three miles at 5:38, 5:25, and 5:19. So three workouts this week. That's a nice number and it is what I needed.

Coaching at UD is going really well. We had a hard workout Monday and a moderate workout Thursday. Saturday, nearly every runner on the team set a personal record. Plus, we are not even peaking yet. I am sure that we are going to have more breakthroughs the last three meets of the season over the next six weeks.

That was about my life.

My Last Day at Work

Today is my last day working at Kohler Power Systems, Generators for the foreseeable future. It was a great ride! I am so thankful to the people that gave me this opportunity. I learned how to use two new peices of software, HyperMesh and ANSYS. I had the chance to work on cost savings projects and with International Building Code requirements. I also got to spend a little time reading technical papers about finite element simulation of welds and structural properties of welds. Basically, it was pretty awesome.

I mean after nearly 12 weeks I am still excited to go to work. I worked with a great group of people. I worked on problems that managed to challenge me and present a new set of skills for me to learn. The materials aspect of it all was rather slim, but I really enjoy structural analysis and design. Honestly, I think that my materials experience along with my finite element experience and structural experience make me a rather potent engineer. While being a contract engineer and moving from place to place is not what I am looking for, my experience thus far has provided me with a rather varied experience which I feel can only benefit me.

Most of all I will miss the people. It is always the people that I miss when I move. The land can be replaced and will continually offer unique aspects that appeal to me. The physical things are replaceable but no two people are the same. Every time I move I miss my friends. Since I know a number of my friends will read this know that I care about you and miss you. I like experiencing new things, but not nearly as much as I like enjoying experiences with my friends.

In many ways this three month long work experience was the best career thing that ever happened to me. After 57 weeks out of engineering I am back in the thick of it! I have experience at another company that is renowned for a high quality product (or at least most expensive in it's market). I can list NASA, Sikorsky, MIT, and now Kohler as places that have paid me for my work. Not bad for a 24 year old. I have heard that many first jobs are not fun for the employee. My experience was the opposite. I had a great time. Additionally, I feel that the things I I learned and the programs that I used while at Kohler were instrumental in getting me the job at John Deere. This experience has been so valuable because of the new skills that I have and the fact that it helped me get a job indefinitely that it would have been worth it to do this job for a whole lot less money than I was paid.

I believe we can never fully appreciate a situation until some amount of time after it is over. This working experience was no different. There are things that I have started to learn from this process that will not sink in for some time. That is part of the fun of life. Learning things about our past that we did not learn in real time.

It was just a great experience. I am thankful that I had the opportunity to experience it. I do not deserve to have this much success, but I guarantee you that I appreciate it. Hopefully you, my readers, read some of the things I wrote while I was unemployed or have been unemployed yourself. No success, in terms of a paycheck or really anything on Earth, is guaranteed. The world is full of gifts. Often the gifts go to those that work really hard, but not necessarily.

Compared to 2010, 2011 is going incredibly well. I have made somewhat more money already than I made in all of 2010. I recently ran a 1:12 half marathon. I have friends. I have family. I have a job, indefinitely. My life is awesome. I hope that in some way you can share in my joy. Sometimes I feel like I am simply bragging about my life to the world, and that is not the point. The point is to demonstrate the things I am learning to do so that you can learn from both my mistakes and my successes and enhance your own life. The problem is that so often the outcome is out of your control or my control and it is harder to learn from something out of your control than some result that you influence. Thank you for reading.

The Life of a Contract Engineer: Week 9

Well, some weeks are better than others, and this was a rather nice week. I was offered a long term position! Of course I took it! A week and a half ago on Friday I was interviewed by some engineers at John Deere. Tuesday I was offered a job. Thursday I accepted it. I will be moving to Dubuque, Iowa to start work April 18th. For now, that is all I will say because the papers have not been signed yet and during unemployment I had my hopes rise just to be dashed so many times that I feel it is not real until I'm there long enough to get that first paycheck. There are so many things that could happen between now and then that are totally out of my control, and few within my control, that I will still live one day at a time with the knowledge of how fragile my personal economic situation really is.

I am so excited! I mean this is a contract position, but it starts at one year in length and will most likely be renewed. That kind of job security is nearly unfathomable to me right now. There is so much to say about this that I won't even try in this post. I will be using HyperMesh and Abaqus to do almost exactly the same thing I am doing now (stress analysis).

How does this affect my work at Kohler? First of all, I am incredibly thankful for the Kohler opportunity. The least productive three months of my entire career are the first three months, I expect. To have a company that was willing to take that kind of a chance on me and allow me to learn two new pieces of finite element software is phenomenal. No company will probably ever be as generous to me as Kohler was. If I am as productive in May, June and July as I was in January, February and March I will be terribly unproductive. Additionally, I worked with an amazing group of people who exceeded my expectations and taught me all sorts of things. I will miss the people most, I always do.

My running had a bad week that ended with the best workout I have ever had. I was tired all week and I ran a 4 mile tempo midweek and I ruined it by going out at 5:10 pace for nearly a mile and putting myself in anaerobic debt. I even had one day where I ran only 2.5 miles. Finally, Saturday I ran 14.1 miles in 1:21:54. That's a 5:49 average on a breezy 31ºF day with flurries. I set personal records at every distance from 7 miles through 14 miles including a half marathon PR of exactly one minute to 1:16:06. Setting a half marathon PR in practice and running a little farther is generally a good indication of running fitness. In total 85 miles with 18.3 of that at sub 5:50 pace.

What else? I am up over 51,000 words on my book. A slow week for writing. I watched the movie Inside Job and it, as well as two chapters in my book, and the newspapers I've been reading lately inspired me to do four articles this week about economics. I'm doing a review of Inside Job, one about CDOs, and then I'll probably do one about the economic recovery that we are experiencing 2009-present as it pertains to unemployment because it pertains directly to my book, and I have no idea what a fourth will be about.

I will be writing a number of posts about Iowa and such in the future, but I feel talking economics this week is more pressing. Thank you all for reading and hopefully you had a week even better than mine.

Ansys: The Pinball Region

Bonded Details (Pinball Region)

When specifying a contact between two bodies or two surfaces such as Bonded, No Separation, Frictional, or Frictionless you can specify the distance that the contact surface, line, or point and the target line or surface. The way that you specific the distance is either Program Controlled, Automatic Detection Value, or Pinball Region.

The Pinball Region allows you to specify a distance and view a little blue ball so that you know if the Contact will actually find the Target. This is important because in manufacturing geometric design and tolerance of parts means that in a CAD model the parts will not actually touch, and may be rather separated, even though in real life they may be welded or bolted together. Additionally, many assemblies are modeled as mid-surface extractions because that drastically reduces the number of elements in the simulation as well as allowing the user to quickly change the thickness, which means different designs can quickly be tried to find the thinest gage of steel or other metal used, and thus reduce cost. Mid-surfaces further separate the surfaces, or lines, for desired contact so that a larger pinball region is necessary. Parts can sometimes be separated by up to half an inch after mid-surfacing!

In the Automatic Detection Value below you can see that the distance in all directions from the Contact Surface reach those of the target surface (the thin line on the left of the green surface). This is what you desire. In this case the Program Controlled or Automatic Detection Value detected the the target surface and no further modification was needed.

Automatic Detection Value (Acceptable Pinball Region)

Adjusting the Pinball region manually in this case to .1 inches allowed the contact sphere (pinball region) to shrink so that the contract surface would not find the target surface. If you saw this happen when you were using Program Controlled or Automatic Detection you would have to adjust the pinball region to a larger number.

A pinball region that is too small for the contact surface to reach the target surface

For clarification, a diagonal view of the two mid-surface extractions show the two small circles that are bonded in this case with the Automatic Detection Value shown. 

Diagonal view of Automatic Detection Pinball Region with two circular contact surfaces shown

The program used for this tutorial was ANSYS Workbench v11.0.

The Life of a Contract Engineer: Week 6

Six weeks! Nearly a month and a half! That is about 10% as many weeks working as I was unemployed. It is a good start. I am still in the honeymoon phase with work though, I am so excited to go to work every morning that I sometimes wake up before my alarm. That being said, I sit at my desk just about all day long and I get antsy to move around a little bit and when 4 PM rolls around I want to go running. It's not that I want to leave work, it's that I want to run. I built up so much self-esteem and positive daily attitude around the simply act of running that even now it seems as important as ever. I'm addicted to running. But I am able to feed my habit with a mere 20 minutes per day and it keeps me mostly healthy so I don't plan on changing anytime soon.

Tuesday I spent the day training how to use another finite element software, HyperMesh. After Abaqus and Ansys, it will be my third FE software. It seems to be very powerful, but my experience is limited thus far.

This week I had a breakthrough Wednesday! The simulation that I have been working on for about three weeks worked! I mean I finally got all the boundary conditions and connections and material properties right so that the results were about what I expected. At 11:30 AM CST Wednesday I was ecstatic. I was so happy that you would have had a lot of trouble bringing down my enthusiasm. The next two and a half days were some of the most productive that I have had. I was setting up simulations and running them and getting results that made sense. Much of engineering is really common sense. I set up the specifics and run the model and I expect to see results in a certain range and when I do I know that I doing most of it right.

I ran 44 miles this week which is one mile more than last week. Sunday I ran 3.3 miles and every day I ran a little bit farther until Saturday I ran almost 10 miles. I had a massage Friday and the therapist poked and prodded and pressed until I was in pain and my muscle knots started to dissipate. I felt amazing better Saturday than I had for almost two weeks. It is amazing how someone besides me can stick a finger in my hip and put me in incredible pain which releases the knots and "toxins" from my muscles. I say toxins in quotes because I'm not really sure what that refers to but I assume it is something that prohibits my muscles from functioning their best. It was a good week.

Socially I had a rather nice week as well. I had two hour long phone conversations with two friends in other time zones. I don't talk to my friends often enough and it was nice to spend some time doing that. I also went out to eat with my sister and some of our friends twice. There was a little more social interaction than that, but I would rather not give the personal details of everything that I do.

This week was so good. Considering the number of the things that I did for the first time this week if they happen again I would be thrilled. If some of those things develop into greater parts of my life I will be even more thrilled! I am so fortunate.

Do I Start to Lie?

I am a terrible lier. Ask anyone. A typical lie will manifest itself about once every two months humorously around my friends which will be followed by myself saying ten seconds later, "I'm sorry. That was a lie..." just incase they did not get the joke and I will explain the truth.

I was taking a true and false quiz for a position at an aerospace company. I was applying for an engineering job. The position was a statics load engineer. One of the questions was, "Do you have a masters degree in Aeronautical or Aerospace Engineering?" I answered "False" because of course I do not have that degree. I have a masters in Materials Science and Engineering. As I stared at the job title and the question I thought, 'Really? A master's in Aeronautical or Aerospace Engineering would know something about static loads that I don't?'

This is not nearly the first question that I have answered "wrong". I often answer questions about specific programs that I have used. Many aerospace companies use CATIA, a CAD and FEA software package. I have not used CATIA but I have used SolidWorks, ProEngineer, AutoCAD and Abaqus as well as creating MatLab simulations. How hard would it be for me learn CATIA? I am 99% confident that in less that one business day I could create a beam and bend it in a finite element simulation. Sure that is very simple to an experienced user, but considering I have never touched the software that would be impressive. I have spent so much time learning different CAD programs and a fair amount of time learning FEA that switching to a new system would be measured in hours or days instead of weeks and months and even years for a true beginner.

So when I am asked how much experience I have with CATIA and I answer "none" I can feel the recruiter passing my application into the junk pile. Interestingly enough CATIA and SIMULIA (the company that produces Abaqus) are owned by the same company. Lest one of my readers think that my education was lacking I would not change a thing. Abaqus supports DANTE which is a very powerful piece of software for heat treating steels and something that CATIA does not do, as far as I know. CATIA can model kinetics, however, I am not sure to what extent it covers. Steel, particularly the Pyrowear 53 I was working with, has fairly complex heat treating kinetics compared to most things.

Wow, that got detailed.

Anyway, I'm not going to lie. I can't. Also, it doesn't make sense. Despite the fact that I could probably pass myself off as knowing CATIA (let's be honest, companies don't actually test your technical skills until you start working; they only ask questions about your technical skills) however, truthfully I don't know CATIA.

Frustrating to say the least. It's like asking if I drive a Ferrari. Well, I've never driven a Ferrari. Does a Porsche count? No. Once again I wonder, do nice guys finish last?

Actually, finishing last would be fine with me. At this point it would be nice to know that I even get to start the race.

Masters Thesis Presentation

I am presenting my Masters Thesis, Modeling of Heat Treating Processes for Transmission Gears, Monday morning at 9 AM in Higgins 102 at WPI.

If you are in the area and have 45 minutes of free time come by and watch. You will probably learn something. There will also be coffee and some sort of pastry.

If you are wondering what I am going to talk about it's all in the title. Basically, I have spent the past year and a half learning how to make finite element models and heat treat them. All sorts of crazy things happen when you heat up and cool down steel at different rates and add carbon to the mix. Before you know it you have a $50,000 gear that likes to turn into a potato chip. So I have worked on simulating the process and trying to have the exact distortion results in my simulations that have been measured on the gears.

A first fruition of my work!

I'm working on this complex model of half of a ring gear. I've been working on it for several weeks, probably more like months. The last two weeks I've been working on associating the mesh with the geometry which is a problem with bottom-up meshing sometimes. In short, the mesh made up of a finite number of elements is not the same as the geometry that you planned. They may look the same but when you take a closer look you will see slightly off angles in the range of .1 or .2 degrees away from parallel. There are also curves that are approximated as strait lines that you need to associate with the geometry. So you must select Mesh > Associate Mesh with Geometry..., then select the feature (face, edge, etc. ) on the geometry, then select the mesh (using "by angle" instead of "individual" works better but keep the degrees like .3 or something low) then click done and the face or other feature you selected on the mesh is now associated with the geometry.

So I just finished associating the mesh with the geometry on my 400 faces or so and Abaqus successfully wrote out the input file (which I still have to edit so that if actually runs)! The point is I am hours (perhaps days) away from a truly fantastic carburizing simulation!

The Limits of Performance

How well can we do something? First two stories:

Usain Bolt breaks three world records (100, 200, 4x100) at the 2008 olympics and then proceeds to break two more (100, 200) at the 2009 world championships. If he is not the best sprinter ever who is? Will there ever be anyone who breaks his records besides him? I suggest that there probably will be. Training and nutrition will improve. Some hungry kid will look at his marks and eventually take them both, or just one of them, down.

My current finite element simulation involves incorporating a stress field into a complex 3D structure then heat treating the part. The hope is that the stress fields will relax and distort the part in a way similar to what we see when we measure the part in real life. The difficulty is that we don't know if anyone has tried this before. Sure it should be possible but it is very complex to assign unique tensors to 52,000 elements. There is no instruction manual to tell me how to do this or even if it is possible.

Sure everyone has limits but who is to say that you can't run .01 seconds faster or get one more question right on the test or simplify the finite element model enough to apply a complex stress field?

Stress!

The finite element stress simulations I create using Abaqus often have very interesting stress fields. The interesting thing about stress is that it is not just a number. It is several vectors, in fact it is actually a tensor. So this is way cooler than temperature because you can't just specify that those nodes are at a certain stress level. So that you can see here is the stress at element 1 in one of my simulations (all numbers are in MegaPascals):

Element: 1 Von Mises: 2.91804 Maximum In-plane: -153.946E-03 Minimum In-Plane: -2.99197 Out of Plane: 0. Maximum Principle: 0. Mid-Principle: -153.946E-03 Minimum Principle: -2.99197 Tresca: 2.99197 Pressure: 1.04864 Third Invariant: -2.90889 S11: -205.309E-03 S22: -2.94061 S33: 0. S12: -378.328E-03

Economic Predictions, New Graduates, and my eBook

Ugh. It does not look good. This is currently the start of my sixth year of higher education. I have been around to see many of my friends graduate and immediately start a new job. They make tons of money, buy new cars, get mortgages, have nice new clothes, pay off student loans, take vacations, and seem to go on summer break indefinitely. That was until this past year.

I have tried to find the following statistic in print but I have not. This is heard from word of mouth from a man who's daughter I believe went to Duke business school, which I heard from another person is #1 in the country. In the past the highest unemployment for a graduating class was 8%, 2009 (it could have been 2008) had 58%. The smart economists interviewed by Fortune are not enthusiastic either. Well, I should rephrase that. They are not enthusiastic about the world economy until like 2012 or so when we figure out more stuff and make better rules concerning debt.

When do we climb out of this? Six years, maybe just until 2012 according to a guy that won a Nobel Prize. My parents told me the other night that Wisconsin was not expected to climb out of recession for another six years and that might be a little exaggerated but the hotel industry in wisconsin is at least not planning to get back to 2007 levels for the next six years.

The total rate in the US for people unemployed and underemployed is 16.8%. The article by Peter Ferrara that let me in on that also said that we need incentives (think government incentives like lower taxes) for job-creating investments. How does this apply to recent graduates? Well, when I first read new jobs or job creating I thought of companies expanding but that is a traditional shallow view of the word "new". What about jobs that never existed before? Apple was one of the first companies to embrace Facebook and send my messages about student discounts and specials offers and new products. I do not know but I would guess that Apple employs several people who deal in social media marketing. People that get paid to promote and keep Apple enthusiasts interested by tweeting, blogging, or sending out Facebook messages to the fan club.

The fact is that new graduates are uniquely suited for these new jobs. For example, in engineering (my area of most experience) more people than ever are learning how to use finite element software. While any mathematical prediction has to be taken with a grain of salt due to the many assumptions the benefits are significant. Several different simulations can be completed in one day by one person whereas physical testing most likely requires several people and several days.

So my hope, and other new graduates, is that the skills we have learned that our predecessors did not will enable us to have a comfortable future. We are in a hard transition. Baby boomers planned on retiring and are having trouble adapting to the reality that many can not afford to retire. They are also having trouble adapting to the new version of Microsoft Office released every two years. Us in Generation Y are having a hard time getting a job because someone in India or China can do the same work as us for half the price or less. Generation X has had a good life, but it looks like things might not always be so easy. It turns out that plasma screens don't pay for themselves when companies give out blanket 20% pay cuts.

The future is scary because things will change. The world is going to be very different. We (people) don't like change. We want things to be comfortable and easy. I read all sorts of blogs occasionally. Notable marketing blogs are: Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, and Duct Tape Marketing. What strikes me about reading some of these blogs is that these people make probably hundreds of thousands of dollars and a lot of what they say I already know. Most people my age already know. They talk about the internet and how to connect to friends. The part where they take a new step is how to use that relationship to sell something. Since no one my age is really selling anything we just use the internet to find what we want. Business people are trying to grapple with this new thing called the internet because no one really understands us yet.

So I'm writing an eBook. My sister is coauthoring it with me because we are sufficiently different to make it complete. The book is going to be about Generation Y, from the perspective of Generation Y. It's about what we want and how we think. It will be free too don't worry. I want to try and explain us better to previous generations. Most of it is pretty obvious I think but it has not really been said in print enough to get the point across. Expect it to be available sometime in October.

Making Assumptions (in Abaqus)

At the conference I attended last week I was able to talked to the creators and owners of DANTE. It is a material database with kinetic phase transformation information that interfaces with Abaqus. What that means is that when Austenite transforms to Martensite and there is a volume change you can simulate that. (It is a really big thing in the heat treating world because only two companies have created software to do that.)

I talked to them about my specific problems and learned that they make many simplifications such as only using one or two heat transfer coefficients in each step on complex parts and simulating the interactions between parts by simplifying the geometry of the parts. I know those are two vague descriptions but I really should not delve into the details. The point is that they just made my job a lot easier. It is amazing how much a 10 minute conversation in person can be so much more informative than an email conversation or trying to read technical papers looking for the answer.

The moral of the story is: perhaps you can find the solution to your problem by simplifying the problem. Of course sometime it can not be simplified...

Meeting the Rockstars

The rockstars of heat treating that is.

Yesterday I arrived in Indianapolis for the ASM International Heat Treating Society biennial meeting. There are ten of my advisor's graduate students and post docs here because he is the president of the society. So far I've met the people that own DANTE and after talking with them I have learn about many simplifications to my model that I was not sure I could make. It was the kind of ten minute conversation that just cannot be had over the phone. When I get back to a place with free Internet and 110 volt outlets everywhere I will have lots of new things to try.

In the hours that we have had off I have managed to run 22 miles so far (including a really easy day today). In exploring Indianapolis I have run on the Carroll track and past the NCAA headquarters and hall of fame. Tomorrow afternoon we have off so I am planning to go to the hall of fame and perhaps go try and talk to some division three person about the state of track and request a 3000 and 1000 meter race at indoor nationals. I might also stop by the USATF office which is maybe three blocks from my hotel.

Abaqus: How to Reduce the Size of your .stt file

Often .stt files can be larger than the .odb files. When you have a limited storage space it becomes important to try and reduce the size of your files. The way to do this is simple: increase the output frequency. This means that instead of writing the resulting data in every single time step to the .stt file only 1/5 or 1/20 or 1/1000 of the step data is written to the .stt file. I think this also makes the simulation run faster but I can not be sure. To reduce the frequency either specify when creating the output requests in Abaqus CAE or edit the input (.inp) file. Here is an example of how to reduce your output requests by editing the input file:

** OUTPUT REQUESTS

**

*Restart, write, frequency=25

**

** FIELD OUTPUT: F-Output-1

**

*Output, field, frequency=25

*Node Output

NT,

*Element Output, directions=YES

SDV,

*Output, history, frequency=25

The frequency could be reduced more or less until you are able to see the information you desire and have a reasonably sized .stt file. A higher frequency means fewer steps are output and your .stt file will be smaller. Also it is important to note that when viewing the time history results of a simulation that the beginning and end of every step will be show. That means that for a step that is ten seconds long you will be able to view the results of the simulation at 0.0 seconds and 10.0. That holds even if the output frequency is 1000.

What is hard work?

I have no idea. I was lifting weights yesterday after I ran ten miles and my Indian friend asked where I got all the energy. I don't know. I said it was because I know there are people out there working three times as hard as I am so I should at least be able to do what I do. Then I have been staring at the computer screen all day that I'm having some trouble telling the difference between a gear tooth root, flank, and top land. But I haven't really accomplished anything besides a few boundary flux conditions and some refined elements. It's somewhat stressful so it feels like it's hard work but I'm just sitting here. It makes me maybe 1% closer (probably less) to my thesis. Add to that that different people are good at different things so what's hard for me is no problem for someone else.

I guess it's in the eye of the worker. The person that benefits may have no idea how hard it was to do. Does it really matter though? Results are what matter not effort. It's harsh but what boss is going to say "well you didn't do anything productive this year, but good effort"? Maybe it's a spectrum of results and efforts and a really complicated thing. I have no idea.

Abaqus: How to Know if your Simulation is Running

As soon as you start a simulation you spend time waiting for it to finish. However, it is not obvious from Terminal (the program I use on my Mac) if the simulation is running or has stopped or ended. All you need to do is check the files in the folder or directory where you started your simulation. I use a simple program called Cyberduck. It is a file management system that allows me to navigate the servers I use (which are two buildings away) as well as download and delete files.

Now when a simulation is running in Abaqus 6.7 the files that will appear have the extensions: .stt, .msg, .odb, .sta, .res, .dat, .mdl, .log, .lck, .023, .prt, .cid, .com, .inp, and sometimes .fil depending on the simulation. The file name will be the same for all the extensions. When the simulation is over the .lck, .cid, and .023 files will disappear. That's all there is to it. Either you have those three files or you don't.

Abaqus: Create Animations

So you spend half an hour loading Abaqus and getting it started to watch the movie of the simulation you ran last night and it was a good simulation so you need to make a movie so you can show your boss or professor or whoever. Here is how to make an .avi, Quicktime, or VRML movie. 

1. Select the Visualization module if it isn't already selected. 

2. Select the Result drop down menu and select the desired result to view. In this example I selected Field History > NT11.

3. Select Animate > Time History ( you can select other options but this is what is most commonly used)

4. Select Animate > Save As...

5. Complete the Save Image Animation box. Be sure to make a unique name and select the file type that you want (.mov in this example because I've had lots of problems with .avi files). Select the Capture: Current Viewport or All Viewports option if you have multiple viewports. You can select the Capture Viewport Decorations and Capture Viewport Compass so that each frame has more information and you can tell what step you are in at any given time. Finally select a very low frames per second rate. I usually do one or two frames per minute because I spend hours working on a simulation that I want other people to watch it for 30 seconds and not 3 seconds. This of course depends on your output rate but for any simulation with many steps your output rate will be low to conserve gigabites so make

 your frames go slowly. An art major once told me that it takes at least 15 seconds of looking at a picture to take in what is happening. 

6. Watch your movie!

Easy Finite Element Modeling

It doesn't exist. For anyone that thinks that setting up a computer simulation is something to do in an hour and then let it run for four hours and look at the pretty pictures you are misinformed. I spent five hours this morning running Jominy end quench blocks in Abaqus using different quenching recipes. It is one thing to create a part or a mesh or several steps or interactions but getting them all to work together and give you the same results that hundreds of scientific papers have proven is a little more challenging. If your elastic modulus is off by one order of magnitude because you missed a centimeter to millimeter conversion it could take you hours to figure out why the wing doesn't flex. 

Modeling isn't easy or fast. Although, I can run a Jominy end quench test in only two minutes after changing the heat transfer coefficients compared to the three hours of actual time to complete a test in real life. 

While my blog has no theme except the challenges I face or stories from my life as a 22 year old in 2009, I post about Abaqus because I spent hundreds of hours figuring things out the hard way so if I can give people a few tips and save them ten hours this world just may be a better place.