A few months ago I posted a discussion thread to the Reactive Flows and Chemical Kinetics Group on Linkedin, a professional networking site.  The discussion was titled:  A controversial topic – modeling without experiments.

I asked group members if they thought that in the next 30 - 100 years engineers would be able to rely solely on computer modeling without conducting actual lab experiments to verify the computer results. I figured that by looking far enough in advance, several generations into the future, I would surely get some responses along the lines of:

“In about 50 years pretty much everything will be computerized. Computers will be built into our brains and cell phones will be implanted into our ears. If we are able to modify our bodies in such a way, something as comparatively simple as combustion inside of an engine or reaction on a surface of a silicon chip could surely be modeled entirely on a computer. It is only obvious that actual laboratory experiments will become obsolete.”

Boy, was I wrong.

First off all, thanks to all of you who responded to that discussion. It is always great to hear ideas and opinions from people all over the world. That being said, I found it interesting that the responses from the group members to that discussion post could not have been further from my thinking.

Here are some excerpts from the posts:

“Of course we will probably see some periods where [computer modeling] will suffice…but probably just for a while.”

“I do not think that in 100 years anyone will built…a plant without running the experiments first.”

The prevailing theme in the comments to this discussion post was that some laboratory work will always be required when designing engineering systems. Whether it is 30, 50 or even 100 years in the future.

These responses left me rather confused. We managed to figure out how to send humans to the moon in a span of about ten years. Yet, somehow, we will not be able to extract the laboratory from the experimental process when designing and building stuff a hundred years from now?

At the SAE World Congress last week, I attended an interesting panel discussion in the ATX Theater. The topic was:  What lies over the horizon – a forecast for the economic/policy climate. The panel was composed of diverse number of speakers. One of the panelists was Richard Goetz from Dykema, who spent 32 years working for Ford. I wondered what the speakers thought about the future of computer modeling in terms of the automotive industry. At the end of the discussion, I asked if the panelists foresaw any growth in computer modeling in the automotive Research in Development groups.

Richard’s response was, and I quote:

“There will be massively more computer modeling. That is the ONLY way that the industry can move forward.”

I try to stay in touch with as many software vendors as time allows. Sometimes that involves showing up at company events, taking training classes or just picking up the phone, calling a vendor up and asking them what’s new with their latest product.  A number of computer modeling development companies, including CD-Adapco and Maplesoft told me that they have seen a healthy growth in revenue this past year, which is obviously an inverse trend to the rest of our economy. Representatives from these companies told me that since everyone is trying to save money, computer simulations are replacing more and more of the costly laboratory experiments in the industry. And the software vendors are happily observing increase in their profits.

So if the experts in the field and the software vendors are predicting and seeing the rise of the computer use in research and development, why is there still such skepticism from actual engineers doing the R&D work?

Obviously there are a number of answers to that question. If you think that you might have an answer, please post your response in the comments section. We would love to hear it. Here are my two cents on why so many of us researchers are so reluctant to let go of the idea that one day, perhaps far in the future, a Bunsen burner and thermocouple might no longer be needed in order to design an new engine. 

Creating and running computer simulations of large realistic systems is not an easy task. I think that one of the main reasons why this is so, is not the limit in computational power. Nor is it the fact that engineering problems are complicated. Nor is it a problem of not knowing all the parameters, variables and assumptions.

I think that it is mainly because a standard and systematic procedure has not been established for taking a real engineering system and converting that system into a set of computer simulations. Sure, there are rule-of-thumb guidelines that various research communities have put together in order to get some meaningful results out of computer modeling. I would argue that it is simply not enough.

If you are conducting a lab experiment and drill a hole in a wrong place in your combustion cylinder – you’ll find out that you have a problem when you burn something inside that combustion chamber. Obviously this is a very simplified case, but with computer modeling there are just too many answers that make sense, even though they might be physically impossible. In a lab, physically impossible things simply do not occur.

So the next obvious questions becomes:

“What would this approach of converting an engineering system into a set of computer models,  look like?”

Well, I promise to address that point in the future posts. Meanwhile feel free to register for this blog and post your thoughts. I would love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading, 

Masha