The 2021 SIMULIA Champions come from locations around the world, as well as from a variety of industries. Several of them have agreed to share their stories about how they are using simulation and what led them to the engineering field.
Dr. Fenghan Lin is an Assistant Professor with the School of Information Science and Technology at ShanghaiTech University in Shanghai, China. Besides teaching and research, he also offers community service on both an academic and non-academic level. Dr. Lin’s history with SIMULIA goes back to his third year of undergraduate school in 2008, when he was required to design a smart antenna array for an RFID system. Senior graduate students recommended CST MWS to him for the project, and he would then go on to work with SIMULIA software again as a PhD student in Singapore.
Dr. Lin received his Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees, both in Electrical Engineering, from Xidian University in China, and his PhD from the National University of Singapore in 2019. After graduating, he worked for a Singapore-based acoustics company called WSA before joining ShanghaiTech in 2020.
“I have passion in research and innovation,”he says. “More than that, I feel the responsibilities to serve a bigger community, scientifically and educationally. ShanghaiTech Unviersity is a brand-new university that allows me such an opportunity with space, funding and smart students.”
Dr. Lin states that he learned from his own growth, and stresses three P-words as advice to new engineers: passion, patience, and persistence. He also has several suggestions for new users of CST software: start with something simple that has a clear guide or examples; buy the software to gain the best technical support from professional experts; make use of free online resources such as YouTube videos; and dive into the physical principles behind simulation.
SIMULIA software helps Dr. Lin in four different ways: simulation, presentation, innovation, and education. Simulation, particularly CST software, has helped him to reduce the time, cost and MCU (manufactural cost per unit) on designs, saving millions of dollars annually. On the presentation side of things, he has used SIMULIA software to help deliver key information to academic and industrial societies. In terms of innovation, simulation “fills the gap between thoughts and experiments,” he says.
“It allows tons of innovative ideas to run effectively, accurately and parallels,” he continues. “Indeed, simulation drives a data-based innovation for both academic and commercial success.”
Finally, there is the education side. Through support from SIMULIA, Dr. Lin’s students have been able to perform simulations to verify what they have learned in his electromagnetic and antenna courses, and some of them have even authored publications and won awards with the help of CST software.
Dr. Lin is still learning new aspects of simulation as well, including its ability to foster cross-departmental and cross-disciplinary cooperation. A newly-developed interface that SIMULIA offered for Dr. Lin’s team to test allowed his team of electromagnetic engineers and researchers to work closely and communicate with PCB designers and thermal and acoustic researchers.
SIMULIA has also helped him to solve some professional challenges.
“Last year we designed an electromagnetic cloaking device,” he says. “The device is very large but also composed of very fine details. We want to do a simulation to find how well it works since the experiment is too expensive for us to afford. However, the total mesh goes up to 2 billion; solving such a big problem would require super computers. Fortunately, with the effective time-domain solver in CST that supports GPU acceleration, we are able to complete the simulation very accurately in a server equipped with NVIDIA GPU cards within a few days, which would have cost a few months without the CST GPU-solvers.”
Dr. Lin loves simulation for the way it allows him to see almost immediately how his ideas will work in the real world. He is excited about his work and the value it adds to society, and is proud of the physics breakthroughs he helps to research that bring about innovative solutions. Outside of work, Dr. Lin enjoys the arts and sports, which he says help make his mind sharper.
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