FEA: Evolution and Current Challenges—Dr. Louis Komzsik

Industrial Finite Element Analysis underwent a significant evolution in the past four decades. We have witnessed tremendous progress in the underlying theory and its practical implementation in commercial software tools, such as NX. The application focus has also significantly widened and the supporting computer technology has evolved during these decades.

In the mid-1970’s a typical model of an automobile chassis had:

• 5752 node points


• 2108 finite elements


• 28924 degrees of freedom

Today, a typical model of an automobile chassis has:

• 12 million node points


• 7.2 million elements


• 35 million degrees of freedom

You can see the scale and complexity of FEA has increased dramatically. So I sat down with Dr. Louis Komzsik our Chief Numerical Analyst at Siemens PLM Software, to ask him where we are, and where we are headed in Industrial Finite Element Analysis.



If you want to learn more; Dr Komzsik will be presenting the keynote at the NAFEMS World Congress June 16th in Crete Greece. 

If you’re not lucky enough to attend this year, you might want to pick up a copy of his book, What Every Engineer Should Know about Computational Techniques of Finite Element Analysis, Second Edition by Louis Komzsik





Jerry