Design Through Analysis

Numerical simulations of physical systems have become an indispensable third pillar in modern computational sciences and engineering (CSE) complementing theoretical and experimental analysis. Most numerical methods in use today like the finite element method (FEM), the boundary element method (BEM), the finite volume method (FVM), and the finite difference method (FDM) have their origin many decades ago when computers delivered only a marginal fraction of their today’s performance and were moreover a scarcely available resource, and CSE was at its infancy. It is therefore no surprise that all aforementioned numerical methods were originally designed as validation tools to be utilized deliberately in one of the final stages of the entire design and analysis workflow and not as a repeatedly queried in-the-loop tool.