There seems to be a rush to judgment to find the flaws that caused the I-35W bridge to collapse in Minneapolis. The new theory—faulty steel gusset plates—strikes me as grasping at straws. Why after 40 years would faulty plates suddenly result in a catastrophic failure? Why has this never been raised before as a potential flaw in this type of bridge? As MIT metallurgist Ken Russell pointed out here recently, steel is made in huge batches, and its chemistry is carefully tested. Suddenly we discovered that this ancient batch was a bad one? Or that the designer used a wrong gauge or grade of steel?
It probably will take months for a meaningful analysis of the bridge failure to emerge. Undoubtedly, the investigators will find a frightening list of contributors to the collapse, starting with the corroded steel roller bearings already reported as deficient in 1990.
A new process for laser-welding large-scale, steel-aluminum foam sandwich structures for lightweighting ships, which eliminates intermetallic phase, has been demonstrated.
A major advance in repairing composite structures combining robots and lasers bodes well for commercial aircraft such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Airbus A350XWB, which contain composites in large proportions of their structures.
Against a backdrop of mounting product complexity and a need to keep a lid on development costs, companies are recognizing a need to make simulation a more integral part of the design process. In response, vendors in the CAD world are building out CAE functionality as part of their CAD suites while simulation vendors are building tighter integrations to leading CAD tools. Keith Meintjes, Ph.D., Practice Manager, Simulation and Analysis at CIMdata, Inc., joins Design News CAD Editor Beth Stackpole in this radio program to explore the new face of integrated CAD and CAE, how companies are benefitting from this tighter partnership between platforms, and how integrating CAE earlier in the development cycle pays off in optimized product designs.
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