"CAE has been an elite subject, with complex tools that were easy to forget dedicated to their use," says Dr. Ashok Das, manager of the Center for Modeling and Simulation at Applied Materials, Santa Clara, CA, manufacturers of semiconductor wafer processing equipment. "Nowadays, not many companies can afford many dedicated analysts. My vision is to bring CFD and FEA tools to the desk of design and process engineers."

Owen Warr, project engineer with Zero Zone, Inc., North Prairie, WI, makers of display coolers, freezers, and refrigerated merchandising cases, has had more than 15 years of experience using a variety of CAE tools. "When it comes to CFD, I remember when I had to write my own programs in Fortran, get geometry from 2D AutoCAD, then merge the program and geometry into Abaqus to run CFD. The dramatic changes in CFD since then are almost surreal," he says.

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