In This Story
Mehdi Amiri is using hands-on learning, software simulation, and 3D-printing to teach students the concept of topology optimization, a design method that reshapes a structure to maximize performance while minimizing material. This helps create lightweight and efficient parts, without sacrificing strength and, consequently, safety.
Amiri, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has students in his Finite Element Analysis (FEA) class consider a complex system like an airplane. “It has a lot of components which go under loads, they vibrate, and then eventually the parts will fail,” he said.
He gives students an original bracket component and using technology donated by software company Ansys, “They do computer simulations and then predict when it's going to fail, where it's going to fail, and why it is failing in the way that it will fail.” They then 3D print the part and attempt to optimize it so that it will fail after withstanding higher loads or will fail in a way that’s different or not expected.
At the end of the semester, students gather to test their new design in a SciTech campus lab in a day of high drama for them. “They don't see each other's design until test day and then they get to ask each other a lot of questions about how they came up with different designs,” Amiri said. “They really like testing to see where the part breaks in one location versus another. They compare it with what they did in the simulation and they are very happy when their predictions were accurate.” Amiri gives out a first, second, and third place prize to students, based on their part’s strength to weight ratio.
Amiri said the relationship with Ansys is beneficial for the students. He received $10,000 from the company last year to develop curriculum for a prior class. The company then proposed free use of their software for the current FEA class. Amiri checks in with an Ansys representative regularly to update them on student progress and give feedback.
Daly said, “Ansys is the premier finite element analysis suite. It has a bit of a learning curve, but once you learn to ‘speak Ansys,’ you can perform almost any analysis you can imagine.”
Daly said that regardless of how he performs, “Dr. Amiri's class covered the fundamental mathematics behind the finite element method. By the end of the class, students who had never touched FEA before, like me, were running structural, thermal, fluid, and vibration analyses on our own projects.” He said it’s clear that Amiri enjoys this particular class.