Allgemein

Our project QUEENS is featured as a success story by Bayern Innovativ. 

The project was funded by the Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs through their BayTOU program and led to our software platform for Uncertainty Quantification and Sensitivity Analysis SQUEENS. 

NAFEMS World Congress 2021 “Online”

We look back gladly to a very interesting and successful NAFEMS World Congress 2021, which took place October 25-29 as an online congress. We would like to thank all those participants who attended the presentation by our CEO Dr.-Ing. Volker Gravemeier entitled “Advanced Simulation and Uncertainty Quantification of Multiphysics Problems” as well as the subsequent discussion, which covered various questions showing great interest in our methods.

“Benchmark” Issue: “The Need for Speed” and – inevitable in these times – “COVID-19”

“Speed” was the originally intended theme for issue No. 2 of the magazine “Benchmark”, the international magazine for engineering designers and analysts from NAFEMS, in 2020. 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 Engineering^GW, is an active member of the NAFEMS Multiphysics Working Group (NAFEMS MWG). However, as David Quinn points out in his editorial, it “turns out that life can change quicker than anything else”. In this blog post, we will have a closer look at two articles of this issue.

Peter Langsten and Marc Halpern identify digital strategies for “Overcoming COVID-19 Obstacles” in their contribution. They conclude that “the COVID-19 pandemic will accelerate many important long-delayed trends such as digitalization, integrated flow of product information, and collaborative applications. The post COVID-19 engineering environment will pose new demands… The new reality elevates the importance of simulation and its environment is critical to step up speed, capacity, availability, performance and reliability of design, engineering, manufacturing processes and systems.” The authors focus on their top 10 initiatives to address engineering and design COVID-19 needs, out of which “governance and supporting technologies” is identified to be the most challenging one in terms of time and cost to implement. Among others, the “increased volatility, economic pressures, changing suppliers, and more demanding customers increase the risk of missed purposefulness in design and simulation activities.” One of the keys for governing “increased volatility in design and simulation activities” is uncertainty quantification, and this is also a core topic of the article to be considered next.

In the contribution entitled “The need for speed to reconcile rationalism and empiricism in a data rich world”, Chris Smith states that “there are an increasing number of situations where vast quantities of data collected from asset-based sensors are not utilized effectively due to the lack of an interpretative framework”, and that “this drives the need for physical frameworks on which to base predictive capabilities.” The introductory part of the article particularly refers to a presentation given by Prof. Karen Willcox, who is with the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas in Austin, on the occasion of SC19: The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, CO, USA, in November 2019. In her presentation, Prof. Willcox points out that “big decisions need more than big data … they need big models too”. In particular, “big decisions must incorporate the predictive power, interpretability, and domain knowledge of physics-based models”. According to Prof. Willcox, the four important aspects in this context are that

• The dynamics of high-consequence applications are driven by complex multiscale multiphysics applications,
• There are high-dimensional parameters underlying the characterization of scientific and engineering systems,
• Data are sparse, intrusive and expensive to acquire, especially in the most critical regimes, and
• Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in model inference and certified predictions in regimes beyond training data play a critical role.

AdCo Engineering^GW bundles know-how from statistics, machine learning and engineering, that is, our “big models”, to provide innovative algorithms for physics-based UQ of systems with high-dimensional parameters in our software QUEENS. This is supplemented by our comprehensive expertise in the solution of complex multiscale multiphysics applications. Thereby, we enable our clients to harness the full potential that digital product development tools and processes can offer. For more information, please visit, for instance,

• Our webpage on UQ,
• Our recent white paper as an introduction to the why and how of UQ, and
• A review article on multi-fidelity approaches for UQ, which gives our clients a competitive edge over users of “standard” methods for UQ.

“Battery cells are a key technology for the energy transition” – that is how Ralph Diermann commences his recent article “The race for the battery of the future” published on Spiegel Online. However, at least two severe problems need to be pointed out in this context. On the one hand – and this applies above all to the German or non-Asian, respectively, perspective -, it turns out to be extremely problematic that battery cells are currently still predominantly produced in Asia. Consequently, any added value or existing delivery dependencies in this context are anchored in that region. On the other hand, the automotive industry, a particularly important industrial branch on the way to the energy transition, has so far been focusing almost exclusively on lithium-ion batteries with liquid electrolytes, although it is foreseeable that the potential of this type of battery is already almost completely exploited in terms of achievable energy density.

Various promising candidates have emerged in the race for the “battery of the future”, which is currently taking place with particularly intensive efforts and investments. To avoid bottlenecks regarding the availability of the important commodity lithium, the suitability of alternative materials, such as sodium, magnesium-sulfur, and aluminum, are researched, with their maturity likely to be in a rather distant future, though. That is why the all-solid-state battery is currently considered the “hottest candidate” in the near future. Arndt Remhof, who is with the Swiss research institute Empa, is quoted as follows: “Solid-state batteries promise a 50 percent higher energy density at the cell level than lithium-ion batteries.” Moreover, he states that “solid-state batteries play an important role in the roadmaps of many car manufacturers” and that “Volkswagen, for example, says it wants to produce such batteries in Salzgitter from the middle of the next decade.”

AdCo Engineering^GW acts at the forefront of this research and development, particularly regarding the aforementioned “hottest candidate”, the all-solid-state battery, providing its customers with advanced simulation technology that is key to a better understanding of this new type of battery. The benefits for our customers are more powerful and safer batteries with shorter development times. In this context, we are currently collaborating very closely with BMW AG.