Skolkovo may soon launch a unique project aimed at developing state-of-the-art strength analysis tools. No matter what we design, there is always the issue of calculating the strength of materials and structures. To analyse a load, action or structure, you need a strength calculation algorithm. Today, the global market of such “analysers” is estimated at $2.3 billion.
It is hard to imagine anybody building an enterprise of this sort in Russia: an average government official would hardly ever understand what this project is about and product developers will never be able to come up to the Western patent requirements without support. This is why software engineers from the Engineering and Mathematics Department of Moscow State University decided that to ask support from Skolkovo was their only option.
Every single multipurpose strength analysis computer-aided engineering (CAE) system used in Russia today was developed abroad. So Russian developers are somewhat dependent on Western engineering software vendors. This situation is disadvantageous for the country from both the commercial and technological standpoints. According to a representative of the FIDESYS project, the market is now occupied by big international players and niche software developers.
By the way, existing strength analysis packages are not flawless. They do not have the capability of reverse analysis in the event of serious strain. “To put it simply, when we know what kind of shape a certain structural element will have after being exposed to a certain load, that is when we see the result of the load, we need to analyse what happened to a material or structure. With existing products, we cannot do this even for a single exposure, let alone analysis of phased loads,” says Anatoly Vershinin, a professor at the MSU Engineering and Mathematics Department and one of the main project inspirers. In addition, most Western software packages employ only one method – the finite element method, which makes them rather inaccurate and inefficient in dynamic tasks.
The Russian FIDESYS strength analysis package designed by experts from the MSU Engineering and Mathematics Department will be popular primarily among sectors requiring strength analysis of individual structural elements subject to significant strain and of materials whose properties may change during application; for example, the product can be used to analyse the strength of nanomaterials in the event of solid-state phase transitions in nanofilms. The package is widely employed for the same purpose by rubber and tyre manufacturers, as well as in medicine – for strength analysis of biomaterials.
“The main difference between our method and the Western one is that we use two calculation cores. Moreover, we use one of the world’s best computational mesh generators, designed by the Institute of Computational Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, under tenure of Professor Vasilevsky, which makes our calculations much more accurate and efficient. Finally, we initially designed our product for super-large tasks,” Mr Vershinin explains.
“Eventually, we want to enter this market because we can offer certain benefits of using new methods – not because existing packages are underdeveloped but because they originated earlier and have not yet been used and tested in research practice. We are writing a completely new code,” Anatoly Vershinin tries to explain in simple language. He says that the FIDESYS strength analysis package is a project unique for Russia and it may help the Russian market for such analysis products become independent of Western vendors.
In partnership with the Skolkovo Foundation, the project will address intellectual property protection issues. According to Vershinin, the innovation centre will assign a patent counsel to the project to monitor the Western market once the project is launched. “Skolkovo will take full control of this situation,” says the professor.
FIDESYS experts also note that the Skolkovo patent division is very good at what it does – “they are like a sharp young soldier with an excellent knowledge of materiel.” “When it comes to registration of an international patent, a certain standard applies. Experts at Skolkovo told us very specifically what we had to do to meet this standard. Because we are no lawyers, it would be really hard for us to do this on our own,” Anatoly Vershinin added.