Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) is a category of software that helps in the design, assessment, and manufacture of engineering products.

Computer-Aided Engineering using Caedium

CAE covers a wide spectrum of engineering disciplines such as:

• Structural
• Thermal
• Fluid flow (e.g. gases and liquids)
• Electromagnetics
• Optimization

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software that represents product designs as digital geometry, serves as the feeder for CAE applications. Increasingly CAE software is being embedded within CAD software.

Rarely is a single CAE software application flexible enough to be used throughout the product design process; hence there are specialized CAE applications to cater for specific disciplines such as fluid flow analysis or Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Also these applications tend to use a single generic analysis technique (e.g. volume-based finite-volume) to generate analysis results. These techniques are tuned for relatively accurate but slow turnaround. Thus CAE applications have found favor in the analysis (or more accurately the verification) of detailed designs, where designs are relatively stable.

Concept design analysis falls within the CAE realm, but due to the rapidly changing nature of concept designs it has proved difficult for existing CAE software to penetrate this field. Caedium and its add-ons are specifically targeted at concept design analysis with the aim of providing a toolbox of techniques within a single unified simulation environment.