Femap Version History
Victorio Galindo
Some people are surprised that I am working in North America as the executive director of the FEMAP Foundation after having spent time advancing public health solutions abroad in Bangladesh, St. Lucia, and Uganda.
The answer is what drew me to public health in the first place, and ultimately FEMAP. Public health is about protecting and advancing the health of people and the communities where they live, work and play, regardless of borders.
Lack of access to health care creates medical problems that do not stop at the border. Consider infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, which historically has robbed people of their vitality and lives.
We approach poverty as a preventable disease, with programs designed to prevent or ameliorate its worst effects. This, combined with its values and history makes FEMAP a lifeline and international example.
Guadalupe de la Vega saw a need more than 40 years ago and responded, and FEMAP continues to do so with forward-thinking programs in health, education, social welfare, and even microfinance. She built something that was a visionary model that programs around the world have copied.
For more information about the 12th Annual Friends of FEMAP International Gala scheduled for Sept. 29 at Grace Gardens, please contact the FEMAP Foundation by phone 915-544-4151; by email at eve...@femap.org, or by going online to www.femap.org/events.php.
In the early 1970s the company began to get more involved with the use of computers for engineering analysis, both to support its consulting work and as a means of generating revenue. Finite Element Analysis (FEA) was beginning to became an accepted engineering analysis tool about this time. FEA had evolved during the 1960s as an aerospace technology with major support from NASA. Two of the first companies to offer software in this area were Swanson Analysis Systems (ANSYS) and McNealSchwendler Corporation (NASTRAN) (See Chapter 22). Prior to products from these two companies being available, SDRC used FEA code it had developed internally as well as a public domain version of NASTRAN available from NASA referred to as COSMIC NASTRAN.
Early FEA programs analyzed models that had a few hundred to a few thousand individual elements. Input data was prepared by laying out a grid of elements on a drawing of the part and then carefully measuring the coordinates of each node. These values were entered on to coding forms which were then manually keypunched into 80column punch cards. It was a laborious process and one very susceptible to errors.
By 1978, in addition to its Milford, Ohio headquarters, SDRC had offices in Detroit, Chicago, Boston, and San Diego as well as in England and France. In addition to its mechanical testing and education services, SDRC by this time was beginning to sell its software products more aggressively. The software was provided in three different ways; customers could license the software for use on their own computers, they could access it via time-sharing over telephone lines or they could bring their data to SDRC and have the analysis work done either by themselves or SDRC engineers on SDRC equipment. Applications supported by the company included static and dynamic FEA, elastic-plastic stress and deformation analysis, heat transfer and fluid flow studies. SDRC used a combination of its own software and software licensed from other developers to support this work. The predominate analysis software being used at the time was NASTRAN and ANSYS.
At this point the company was growing fairly rapidly. By mid-1977 employment was up to about 220 people, of which more than 85 percent worked in Milford. With rapidly growing sales, the company was becoming quite profitable as shown in the following table:
One of the most difficult business issues facing SDRC was how to develop a sales and distribution channel, both internally and with business partners. This was particularly difficult for an organization whose management was made up of academically-oriented engineers. The initial sales organization was set up as SDRC Systems under Sid Barton. This is the group that eventually evolved into the CAE International organization described below. The company was eager to establish marketing relationships with other companies that could help it sell SDRC software packages.
In the late 1970s, Tektronix (see Chapter 22) dominated the computer graphics market as much as Microsoft dominates the PC operating system market 25 years later. Its 4014 storage tube terminal was used extensively with both timesharing and standalone systems for engineering design and analysis. The 4014 was packaged with an Interdata minicomputer and sold as the 4081. This, in turn, was used as the platform for a finite element modeling system, the FEM181. It was slow to gain market momentum but Tektronix was committed to expanding its presence in the mechanical engineering market. In August 1978, Tektronix established a new organization, the Mechanical Engineering Graphics Business Unit (usually referred to simply as MEG) under the management of Claude Tucker.[4]
A new agreement was worked out with SDRC in early 1979 under which SDRC took on the responsibility for sales and support of both the FEM181 and SUPERTAB software while Tektronix sold the graphics hardware and in some cases MEG131 computer systems. This relationship lasted until late 1979 when Tektronix suddenly decided to get out of the mechanical software business, leaving SDRC to proceed on its own.
As part of the agreement between Applicon and SDRC, Applicon was reselling SUPERTAB while SDRC had set up half a dozen automated design service centers using Applicon CAD systems. (See Chapter 7). One reason for the close working relationship between the two companies was that they both used Digital computer systems making it easy for customers to install their software and exchange data between packages. By early 1982 the relationship between the two companies deteriorated and a number of SDRC people including Dick Miller, Rex Smith and Paul Vollbracht left to join Applicon. They were followed a few months later by Russ Henke.
International while Gerald Knobeloch was made manager of North American operations, James Sherlock was manager of international operations and Martin Meads was manager of European operations. In May 1985 Knobeloch became general manager of this organization.
Not all these capabilities were included when I-DEAS was launched in the early 1980s but were added as time passed. The intent was to use a common database and a consistent user interface. The company also began development of a faceted solids modeler around this time which eventually evolved into GEOMOD described below.
GEOMOD, which was introduced in 1983 (beta test versions had been installed at GE the prior year), added a NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline) boundary representation capability to the earlier faceted modeler. Curved surfaces were represented using planar faceted surfaces with user control over the size of these facets. This improved software performance but at the cost of some lost precision. The software synchronized these two representation of geometry. In addition, the user could record a design session in a manner that created the equivalent of a Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) data representation.[8]
A key aspect of GEOMOD was its ability to interface with other I-DEAS modules. Kinematic analysis was performed with a Mechanism Design module while SUPERTAB was used to prepare model data for finite element analysis using either SDRC software such as SUPERB, FRAME, SYSTAN, FATIGUE and MODAL-PLUS or third party packages including ANSYS and NASTRAN. By this point in time SUPERTAB had been complemented by an automatic mesh generation program called TRIQMESH.
Drawing production was handled by exporting GEOMOD data to GEODRAW, a package the company licensed from Computer Aided Systems for Engineering (CASE) or other third-party drafting programs. Data was transferred either as a wireframe model or as view-dependent surface boundary descriptions with hidden lines removed. In the 1985 timeframe, changes to the GEOMOD model did not result in changes being made directly to the GEODRAW drawings nor did changes to the drawings affect the model. That technology would come later. GEODRAW could be used to define two-dimensional profiles that could then be imported into GEOMOD and used for extrusions and revolves.
By early 1985, SDRC had installed nearly 300 copies of GEOMOD at over 100 customer locations. GE-CAE International typically sold I-DEAS software on a perinstallation basis. As of October 1985 basic GEOMOD sold for $35,000, the system assembly option for $20,000, Mechanism Design for $5,000 and GEODRAW for $25,000. Workstations versions of the software were priced lower plus the company offered substantial quantity discounts. In addition to buying I-DEAS software from GECAE International, customers could purchase complete turkey systems from Calma, IBM and GenRad. The latter, of course, was focused primarily on vibration testing systems. About 65 percent of the company software revenue came from the GE-CAE International sales force while the balance came from its turnkey partners.
Over the next several years, SDRC continued its transition away from being considered a mechanical engineering consulting firm to being more of a traditional software organization. It should be noted that throughout this transition, there did not appear to be any intent on the part of the company to turn itself into a turnkey systems vendor. Since GE owned 49 percent of GE-CAE International and all of Calma, it is fairly clear that Calma was the designated systems house while SDRC was encouraged to focus on the software and consulting aspects of the market.
In April 1986, SDRC introduced I-DEAS software that could be used to optimize part designs by minimizing the mass of these parts. This was several years before Rasna began offering comparable software. The SDRC software enabled users to work with multiple load cases in order to ensure the integrity of the design.
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