The Maturity Paradox
There is still a substantial gap between using simulation in industry, on the one hand, and fully meeting the respective needs, on the other hand. This is one of the essential messages of the article entitled “The State of Composites Manufacturing Simulation” and authored by Jonathan Belnoue on the results of an industry survey in the recent issue No. 2/2026 of the magazine “Benchmark”, the international magazine for engineering designers and analysts by NAFEMS. NAFEMS is the international association for the engineering modelling, analysis and simulation community, a not-for-profit organization established in 1983. Dr.-Ing. Volker Gravemeier, chief executive officer of AdCo EngineeringGW, is an active member of the NAFEMS Multiphysics Working Group (NAFEMS MWG).
While 60% of respondents to the survey use simulation, only 28% report that simulation fully meets their requirements. Three primary barrier categories are addressed in the article. Besides insufficient skills and knowledge as well as missing material and process data, as the third of those barriers, 35% of the respondents refer to solution quality as a barrier. In fact, those responses indicate that, as the author states, “available simulation approaches are inadequate in accuracy, reliability, or computational efficiency”. Moreover, 30% mentioned that, for their applications, adequate technical solutions do not even exist as yet, expressing that “current scientific understanding is insufficient to construct even approximative predictive models for certain processes”. While this survey particularly aimed at composites manufacturing simulation, it is very likely that surveying the status of simulation for other applications would yield quite similar results.
AdCo EngineeringGW has comprehensive expertise in predictive simulation of various challenging applications, in particular, complex multiphysics and multiscale applications. Based on this expertise, we enable our clients to harness the full potential simulations can offer.