SIMCenter Offers Online Certification Program in the Practice of Finite Element Principles

The Simulation Innovation and Modeling Center at The Ohio State University is offering an online certification program: Certification in Practice of Finite Element Principles. This program, designed for the practicing engineer, provides graduate course material with practical application in order to support engineers in adapting CAE techniques to their work.

The program is available completely online to increase accessibility for working engineers with busy lives. Each course within the program is ten weeks long, with each course containing six modules.

If you take three courses in the program you will receive an overriding certificate in the Practice of Finite Element Principles. However, the courses are designed to be flexible, and students can take any of the four courses that they are interested in while earning a

certificate upon the completion of each course. To complete a course, students are assigned multiple choice quizzes reviewing the technical content of the module, a homework problem set evaluating their theoretical understanding of the content, and a project which is built upon week after week to apply the theory and knowledge to a practical application. The project is selected by the students so that each student is empowered to work on a topic that is relevant to their job.

“We saw that it was hard for engineers out in the workforce to acquire new skills and abilities while they’re also working. There is a real need to develop professional development programs that are designed for the working engineer,” said Emily Nutwell, research specialist and educational manager at SIMCenter.

Nutwell has worked in industry for more than twenty years and has had experience as an

experimentalist and at performing crash analysis using the Finite Element method.

With this certification program engineers can learn to come up with interesting solutions at low cost by testing in the virtual world instead of prototype testing which can be expensive and time-consuming. Using these virtual tools opens new and creative ways to solve problems and allows engineers to consider solutions that may have not been intuitive or clear to them before.

“The biggest thing that I want people to get out of this program is to remind them that getting back to the more technical foundations will support them in their everyday jobs and their approach to solving problems. I think that often when engineers go out into the workforce, they don’t really make that connection between the things that they learned in school and the things they need to know,’ said Nutwell. “If we can encourage engineers to look at the theory at an appropriate level and apply that to their problem solving it will support and accelerate their ability to solve problems and meet the challenges they’re facing. We want them to be excited about using these new tools and to explore creativity in engineering problem solving”.

Course participants can use whatever software tools are available to them. If they don’t have access to the necessary tools, the SIMCenter has a partnership with the Ohio Supercomputer Center that can provide them with a virtual classroom space and the resources they need.

For more information about the individual courses and schedule visit our page: Online Certification in Practice of Finite Element Principles.

Written by Muhammed Alrefai