We were pleased to have Dr. Milton DeHerrera present one of two Keynote Presentations at the 2022 SIMULIA Santa Clara Regional User Meeting, June 22, 2022.

Abstract: In this presentation, I will discuss the importance of High Performance Computing (HPC) in the Medical Device industry, show an example based on an FEA based radial fatigue simulation of the anchor of a Mitral valve reshaping device, compare performance between initial (2009) and more recent (2022) computational hardware, discuss “war stories” based on my usage of Abaqus going back to 1995, including the evolution from dual core workstations to multicore Linux servers, explain the great value of Abaqus Explicit in running FEA’s with a lot of contact.

Biography: Originally from Dominican Republic, Dr. DeHerrera has been dealing with FEA on and off for over forty five years, starting with using the UC Berkeley solver SAP-4 on an IBM 360 mainframe in the early 70’s to running Abaqus Standard and Explicit on Linux servers and a Linux desktop in the present day. He received a BS and MS in Civil Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in Civil/Structural (with a minor in Applied Mechanics) from Stanford University. Somewhere along the line, he decided that FEA was more interesting than Civil Engineering; he has pretty much been doing the former full time since 1990.  He started using Abaqus in 1995 while working at Freudenberg-NOK General Partnership in Manchester, NH, and continued using it when he joined Edwards Lifesciences in 2002.  Dr. DeHerrera started using Abaqus Explicit in 1997 after asking HKS for help in solving a nasty deformable-to-deformable contact problem that was not converging in Standard but ran beautifully in Explicit, despite the analysis dealing with two nearly incompressible materials. He is the father of four adult children, one millennial stepson, and grandfather of a five month old boy.

Slide deck:

RUM2022 ​​​​​​​RUM2022-SantaClara Abaqus ​​​​​​​Life Sciences ​​​​​​​