Meet SIMULIA Champion Thomas Siegmund. He is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. In addition to teaching and research, he oversees a laboratory called the Microstructure Testing and Analysis Laboratory, which has both a physical and a computational component. Siegmund works with both graduate and undergraduate students at all levels at Purdue. Purdue University is a land grant university and member of the Big 10. It is classified as R1: Doctoral University - Very high research activity, and the College of Engineering is ranked in the top 10 US wide.
Siegmund’s students use Abaqus “extensively and nearly exclusively” when it comes to finite element analysis, he says. Siegmund has worked with the software since 1991 and has been using it at Purdue since 1998.
Siegmund considers his greatest successes to be guiding students from the beginning of their undergraduate and graduate education to the completion of a degree such as a Ph.D. He likes to help them learn what they can do and to see them develop both personally and in their scientific and problem-solving skills.
“The individuals who come from an institution like Purdue are our main asset,” he says. “We recognize that we can only conduct research so much and produce so much research output, but those who take it from here to a position at another research institution or company or government lab amplify our reach into what we can do.”
Siegmund’s motivation stems from a desire to solve problems and to tell the story of how the problem was solved in a journal publication that someone else can pick up, learn from and possibly expand on. He has published 200 academic papers and patents, and his current research focuses on computational mechanics relating to fracture and fatigue, biomechanics and architectured material systems.
We will be getting to know some of our individual SIMULIA Champion in a series of blogs, finding out more about their history – and future – with the technology. Read the full interview with Siegmund on the SIMULIA Blog.
https://blogs.3ds.com/simulia/meet-simulia-champion-thomas-siegmund/
