The theme @HxGN Live was how to enable smart digital reality in manufacturing products.

Here are my notes from the key speeches I attended:

Bruce Engelmann and Arno Zinke emphasized on the shift left philosophy from Operations to Development to enable purposeful innovation via zero prototype development and how the use of reduced order models (ROM) – the “new” super-elements would speed results. Data is key and having the right data at the right time is important for such transformations. They also introduced the Nexus platform for engineering innovation and smart manufacturing collaboration.

Amberlee Haselhuhn from LIFT, one of the 16 organizations that comprise the Manufacturing USA Institutes spoke about Additive Manufacturing and metal composites in the context of Technology Readiness Level TRL and why levels 4-7 are referred to as the Manufacturing valley of death and why we have to deal with some very hard arithmetic in new manufacturing processes.

Srinivasan Sundararajan who now is part of Ford Motor Company EV forays explained why startups have an advantage over older established companies when it comes to building a platform from ground up and why data and ROM methods are key to effective simulations especially in the area of safety (both vehicle and pedestrian) that has been Srini’s domain for several decades.

I also attended several breakout tracks in Machine Learning and Materials that were very informative, some key bullets:
– Product Data is an amorphous beast
– AI is a promising complement
– The cloud is a beautiful thing. I run 60,000 Adams simulations coupled with Microsoft Research Bonsai every Monday morning
– The customer has a say but it is hard to hear
– If design were left to engineering it would be a nice rectangular box
– Analysis paralysis and Prototype purgatory

I would like to thank David Nance, Tony Bromwell and Robert Segal for inviting me to this event.

At Numorpho Cybernetic Systems (NUMO), our goal is the full realization of the potential of digital and physical melding utilizing our Digital Twine reference architecture for process automation. Our partnership with Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence and utilizing their simulation tools from MSC Software will help virtualize the process platform for our clients. This will enable them to be proactive in research, product development and manufacturing activities by help building AI driven expert systems that have the correct basis for surrogate data for training using multi-physics based simulation information.