10: Simulate This! A Chat with Ansys, Ep. 10

Hello. Good day to you from episode 10 of our podcast series Project Breakaway. A metaphorical and literal time in the day when we here at Predator Cycling take some time away from working in the back shop to come and share with our listeners what we're doing, how we're doing it, and what it takes to do it, our ideas, our innovative success stories, and even our missteps and failures. If you find yourself with an interest in bicycles, composite manufacturing, out of the box design, or even curiosities beyond, I encourage you to stick with us, settle in, and learn a little. I'm Courtney B., co-owner and project manager of Predator Cycling. I'm here with my partner, Aram Goganian, the other co-owner, CEO, lead designer and engineer, and simulation superstar of Predator Cycling. Today, Aram and I are excited to have our second guest on the show. So, welcome Kurt Chan. Kurt, you are the senior product marketing manager at ANSYS, a highly professional engineering simulation and design software company. And it just so happens that we here at Predator utilize your software for our frames and components. So, welcome Kurt. How are you today? Good morning. I'm doing fabulous. Thank you for having me on today. Yeah, thank you for being our second guest. So, as a quick overview, Aram and Kurt have known each other over a number of years. Uh Kurt onboarded us at Autodesk when we were just really starting to dive into CAM softwares and I think ever since, uh both Kurt and Aram have really progressed in the industry uh across service application and proficiencies. Kurt has now carried us into the ANSYS family of software and showed us the potential of our simulation evolution. Ooh. So, Kurt, real talk. Yep. Uh did you think that you'd still be involved with this nerdy Armenian guy who was working out of a cinder block garage seven years ago? You know, it we go way back, right? Like when you gave that intro, it brought me back in time to when I pulled up and I saw you in there with Kaching Song, who we all know very well. And I it just it's a memory, right? It's a memory that I will never forget of hey, look, we're just two dudes that are going to come and interview you and and just have a conversation and and learn about our customers, right? I think that's that's the best part is you look at where we are now, seven, six, seven years later, which is mind-blowing, that uh my business motto is think relationships first, business second, right? And when, you know, we just keep in touch and I think we can all agree like we've all been to the trade shows, the you know, Autodesk Universities, all these different events where we run into the same people, run into other customers, and we just have this great relationship. And when I made a transition over to ANSYS in my career, uh we were just candidly having a conversation of like what do you guys, you know, what does ANSYS do? Oh, well, we do this. Um and you're like, well, you guys do something with composites? Well, yeah, we we we we like lead, we're a leader in that. Oh, well, this is awesome. And it wasn't like I'm not a sales guy. It's not like, oh, well, hey, I've moved out another sales role and I'm trying to sell you something else or trying to fit what will, you know, work for you guys. It was just like, oh, well, you guys actually have a solution. This is this is great. Let let me educate myself more and hey, wait, this can save me time and oh, you guys have a startup program too? Like how this is phenomenal. And you guys have a partnership now with Autodesk? What's it just gets better and better, right? I think things just kind of fell together or unfolded as we just continued our conversations professionally, right? Just casually professionally, but more of it's our conversations are more of, hey, man, how's the family doing? Hey, how's business? Like what's new? What new CNC machine you got? Oh, you doing this? So, it's it's it's been a great adventure and an awesome friendship. Yeah. And I think that segues right into my next question is who and what is ANSYS? And what is the solution that ANSYS offers their customers? Yes. It it for all the engineers who are listening, right? I think they they have heard of the name, right? And you'll hear the different pitches of, you know, we're the gold standard when it comes to to simulation. And people are like, what is simulation? Well, think about us at ANSYS of what we do. If you if you look at your everyday life, right, of what you do and how you go about like whether the cell phone you're tweeting from to the airplane you're getting on to travel to the car you're driving in, right, uh simulation plays such an important role in those types of industries because when you look at what we can do at ANSYS is that we can digitally simulate to know hey will this product fail at what time and how long is the life of that product gonna be or based on weights if I sat in this chair what's the maximum weight it can take based off different material properties and and it's like came here yes simulation gets very nerdy and and you know it's funny because we have more than 750 PhDs here at ANSYS like that's like a third of our our working staff like I'd make the joke when I go to the office I'm like oh yeah we got more PhDs in this building than like the hospital down the street you know more doctors in this building than the hospital down the street right but it's it's such a just interesting dynamic of super smart people but then do you look at like the behind the scenes of what you can do with our technology simulating it it's it's remarkable right I learn every day I see a different equation on the whiteboard every day or talk to somebody differently every day so we forget the importance of how that fits into a product development process here at ANSYS great we've been I mean it's I've been geeking out over how much you can simulate I was like I'm you know we've been scratching the surface of simulation for years and and going more and now with ANSYS like taking a deep dive into it it's like I mean you can it's just it's endless it's pretty cool right on the just to add to that too is like people people are afraid of simulation like to be very frank it they feel like they got to be extremely smart or have a PhD or like they feel that that barrier to entry is like oh well I got to go to the expert to do this stuff all the time and yes there are like people that are experts specifically in that but you know our the end goal is hate to use the word democratization right but it's really like how do you introduce simulation more in design processes and sure we'll talk about where it fits in but at the day it's it's a we're taking down that barrier to entry right which is great because like you I'm a manufacturing guy that's how we met right manufacturing right doing something different so it's all about new new challenges down the barrier to entry for us was basically the introduction as a small business so you Kurt were key resource for our small business um so our um how do we here at Predator use ANSYS in our design workflow well as Kurt was talking about in in that introducing simulation early on that's something that was really big for us we started that process in in Fusion because Fusion had simulation built in and we started doing simulation you know actually as soon as they introduced it into the process of our designing our products and then we started using we kind of hit like a wall of where we couldn't go any farther because we couldn't simulate composites and there wasn't like a CFD option and things like that and that's why we started looking at other things and that rolled into ANSYS and now with ANSYS we can actually simulate wind flow drag and all of our composite structures but what I hadn't I didn't know until we actually started playing with ANSYS was with discovery we can actually simulate like live simulation while modeling so that's a big thing that we introduced in our workflow so that we could introduce simulation during the concept stages of a product so we'll start on a product now and we're literally simulating I mean 30 minutes into designing a part um and so we can kind of get get rid of that that like design bias that engineering bias that you have and that's something that's big for me because you know I've been doing bikes for 20 years now and you have this thing is like oh I know how like I know the best way this is gonna work and then with simulation it kind of takes that out I'll put something in there and I'll be like oh like it's saying that I did that wrong or I should you know look at load forces coming from a different direction and it helps you design a part better so ANSYS has now become part of our workflow I mean it's simulation is something we run every single day now it's it's great it the biggest key wine I took from that was like live live simulation and it's it's interesting right because we're all like oh well we just like expect it to be live because you when you CAD model right as you design something like you're doing an extruder you're doing this pull or you're if you're in Fusion this T-spline surface like we're like it that's live but when it comes to simulation people understand it's like well you know it takes one it can take some computing power and then two hours even days to get a result yeah back and then you can come back and be like well that that was wrong like now I got to go waste another four hours to to rerun this and I think that's that's the where the industry is transitioning to right or what we're doing here at Ansys is from a lot we call it live physics our live physics solver within discovery enables you to experiment very quickly iterate and then and then move forward and you know you look at about like like and you know me right six years at Autodesk like I bleed fusion like I love that right like I was a part of that at the beginning and there's that's a seminal piece to me and it has simulation products in there and they're they're still great right it's just dependent on well what's the workflow you're trying to accomplish right too and then you know we'll talk about it material properties right like what you guys do like you're not everybody does 661 t6 right like that's not just wait what is that aluminum right like everybody is just you know using the same aircraft no like you guys do specific things and and especially when you get to composites so we offer a lot you talk about that mhm yeah and that's one of the things that for us was a big thing with um with one of our handicaps with with fusion and some a lot of other simulation tools was custom materials and be able to simulate custom materials in that so it gets it gets tricky it gets really hard and that's which is one of the new products that we're introducing is our direct to 3D print manufacturing of some of our parts and we couldn't do that originally um we didn't originally go down that path because we couldn't figure out if it was going to be viable or not and with Ansys and a bunch of the material simulators and the material libraries that we have access to we could actually build custom material profiles for parts for materials that we had that we could print and then we could actually simulate those parts before we even got the materials in house we could figure out our cost matrix we could figure out if it's viable output levels consistency of parts we could figure all that out you know before even buying anything like we just simulate that way ahead of time um and that's something we've been playing with a lot um and again it's like using especially using topology optimizers uh that that's that's fun um and you just watch the part like explain to me what topology optimizers are um well topology optimization is looking at a body so in well I'll give you an example in our workflow so we take a part we'll design the original part we'll design in typically in fusion and then from fusion we'll we'll send that over to Ansys discovery which now has a built-in tool so you can send it which is really cool uh that's recent too right because our um was like literally at his desk I think he's singing a song about the ease of transfer from that program to the other program oh yeah there was there was a if you ever need a jingle maker for and you knew yeah a really bad jingle maker give me a call I'll sing you a really bad song we should have that your your jingle maker there when you click the button it just like sings to somebody so it's just it just goes over during the export no that's awesome yeah it's they they hate that but yeah but yeah I know that that was a super cool feature but we'll send a body into into uh discovery and then from there we'll run a the first thing I typically do is actually run topology op set up my model and then run a topology optimization which basically is looking to remove excess material that's unnecessary um to achieve the the the properties that you're trying to reach in your part um and for me it gets rid of that something I said earlier is is that bias I have that design bias inherently always so it it kind of says oh wait you know why are you putting material here you should put more material here or um you know move things around and then in discovery you can actually um add body like you can add to the body and modify the bodies that you brought in so I can actually add and build to it and then run that topology optimization again and it just it's doing it live and it's pulling results from every change that I make so I can kind of manipulate the part understand better where the forces and loads are coming from and how much material I need and what I don't need I can run graphs on the side and it tells me my weights and my targets and my deflection and it's really cool it's really cool you bring up so many great points here because like and yes I work for Ansys right but like you look at the market up there's a lot of products out there that do generative design or topology optimization right and you know people can go down that rabbit hole of like oh what's the difference yeah you know we'll see that for another conversation but you look at you know the value right like what just as a whole topology optimization is allowing you to explore right in your product development process and we just do it the fastest, right? Just because of like our technology, our leveraging our live physics, leveraging our partnership with Nvidia and you know, you guys did a phenomenal story with Lenovo, beautiful around how hardware plays such an important role in computing, right? Because people think, ah, well, you know, you got the cloud and it's like, well, you know, the cloud is like technically just 10 of these other desktops here hooked up together doing your stuff. It may be 10 of your desktops, but it's not 10 of mine. Exactly, right? It's one of yours. But that's the thing for people to remind to remember is that, you know, it's still going somewhere to compute. Like you you can just now, why not just have the comfort right there and have it live? So, there's so many different avenues we can go down in regards to our technology and leveraging it. But it's impressive to see that people, um, like like you can now explore fast and make decisions faster, right? And and I think that's just across what every engineer or small business wants, right? What is it? Fail fast and learn from it, right? And move forward. And if the last thing you want is the is a hiccup in technology to slow that down because like I've been in this game for some time and I remember starting off where you where you wait or you have hardware issues or you have these things that slow you down as production and today's like you know, we live in as Gary V says, right? Big fan of his stuff. We live in the the best time of society like and not saying because it's like we're we're you know, it's 2021 and there's so much technology. It's like no, like the opportunities we have today versus what somebody had five years ago like cell phones were still around, internet was around, but it's just what we now can do with that technology. It's gotten it's improved so much that Oh, it's scary. We can do so much now. Yeah. Well, I was actually I had this conversation with my mom a couple days ago and I was telling her I was like I it's one I was I mean when I first started Predator, I was just thinking about starting it. I was you know, I was 14, 15 and I was telling like, oh, like I was reading an article about like, you know, simulation and all these cool things you can do and I'm like one day you're going to be able to do this, this and this and all this crazy stuff and like I was just joking with her. I was like, oh, my gosh, we're actually doing it now. Like we actually have stuff that was like just like concepts or like there was no way it was aerospace only, defense only, medical use only. Yeah. You know, now a tiny company like us that wants to try and push it as hard as we can, we can actually get access to this stuff. We can Well, the availability, I think, now. I mean, we are fortunate to be onboarded with Ansys into your starter program. Yeah. So what I I mean, what are the benefits of that program for businesses that might not be aerospace? Yeah, it's you know, we're introducing the affordabil the affordability and the availability of of simulation, right? And when you look at the Ansys startup program and and for those people or those companies that are listening that are like, oh, okay, I didn't know Ansys had that. Well, we do, right? And it's a very simple process and we work hand-in-hand with our channel partners to to provide that support. Um, we're here to then make sure that you got like startups, we we understand how expensive simulation can be and based off startup budgets and and how things work for for for budgets and so forth. The the overall goal is to make sure we can help you guys be successful, right? And I think that's with any startup program is that, you know, you look at what Autodesk does, it's all about that success and then adoption because if you're going to be successful with it, you're going to help evangelize too, right? It's it's this community we want to help support and um, because you know, you guys could be the the company, right? People always forget people say, ah, it's they're they're just this small company over here. Ah, they're they're see, you guys could be the company that Trek buys out, right? Because because of this. Like how many times do you hear about out of Silicon Valley, Google buying the startup that I was just working with or some other company. Like it's just this is not 1995 anymore, right? Like we we can now we have people that are not even going to college and just go starting a business and getting bought out by, you know, Facebook or whatever, right? It's just the opportunity. So, the being in the game of startups is not only one helping them be uh, funding is not the right word. Not helping them fund their business, but it's just more of helping them uh, drive success criterias, right? And be successful. Um, and you know, we have different criterias here with our startup program, but it's it's it's all relative to all the other variables you have for your business. For sure. I mean, we were just talking about this, uh, was it like two weeks ago when we were with we had a call with Lenovo, some of the guys from Lenovo and we were talking about some of the like the P620 that we've been testing out and they just release you're talking about the story earlier and um I mean with the with a workstation like that and you you know we have the we're running the NVIDIA RTX A6000 so this monster GPU system and not leveraging it with ANSYS software I mean it has completely changed ex I mean it's it completely accelerated the rate of how fast we're designing and building stuff here I mean now I mean all of our molds now we run I never thought I would be running thermal testing on all of our little molds and products that we run and we're doing it now I mean it's um the the RF 20 our new road frame that we're working on has we're able to bring that to market now because of the simulation and hardware that we have I mean otherwise I don't think we could have done it I we couldn't have figured everything out it would have taken us so long every time you prototype something and then you try and do a test and you prototype and then it doesn't work quite right and it's like well why didn't work right and that's like the thing that simulation always it's it's helped us answer that question of why didn't it work what happened you know where was the pressure where did that pressure go what happened why did we get a you know a cool spot in our mold there I mean like all these types of little questions that we always ask now we can figure it out before we even make the part um so it's just helped us accelerate that process so much and that's getting us now to finish parts and it's actually you know now opened us up so that we're not just we're finishing that part we're actually going into whole new sectors that we didn't think we would because we have the simulation capacity it's it's completely changed it's simulation I mean in my opinion simulation now is on par with like CAD and modeling as a necessity like you have to have it if you don't have it I mean if you don't have yeah I mean you have it's part of it it's just it's not something separate it's it's simulation design it's it's it's so connected yeah yeah in our workflow it's one thing I mean there's no it's there's no separation it's just you model it and you simulate it like and we're simulating while we're modeling like and that back and forth because otherwise it's it I mean to be honest it becomes a waste of time like why don't you I mean you're gonna I don't want to make a bunch of parts that aren't gonna work or have fail points that we could easily figure out so to I mean and I know we which is awesome your your clientele who who tunes in is is is a mixture of everybody right and the you know my question man is like all I hear about is road bikes man and what's up with the mountain bike when is that come in the market the what I'm sorry mountain bikes I don't know what that is it's like what what what what huh you know it's funny you say that because we get hit up all the time for mountain like not all the time but we get it's a question that comes up a lot you know my big thing is I so my obsession when it comes to especially with Predator my obsession of designing and building parts that we know everything about so like for me I grew up racing road track time trial that that was the scene that I grew up in I did race some mountain bikes but um like that was that's what I know really well like I know my geometries I know my parts I know my layups mountain bikes is like there's more variables that I just I don't know that well so yeah plus I don't think Courtney's gonna let me take on another project no oh my god I mean now that we have the like ease of doing much more with all of the software's and hardware's that we've acquired in the last couple of months it's just it's too much it's too much for me to handle all of his inventions that are now coming to life it's all your fault and all good I don't and and it just you know putting that spark in right in your in your mind but it's like I I don't and I have not had a chance to road bike right and look I live in Southern California right so I should be road bike should you know and and that's kind of the the piece of the puzzle is we have so many people here that like that that kind of community is huge right like I didn't realize it until you start doing it and you're like oh I didn't know like all these people do it right and just colleagues friends like oh we can you know have it's like golfing right you can catch up with somebody still have fun get exercise like do all these different things and it's it's such a great community to be a part of so I I wish I for those people that are thinking about getting into it I wish it I did this a long time ago right cycling it's a it's a you don't realize either like how it's you're everywhere like I was doing when we're doing our Lenovo customer story there was a couple of people that were on one of the calls like oh I'm a cyclist like you know and then it was it was really interesting like we had mutual friends and we knew people and it was like oh like that's funny it's it's yeah we're everywhere we've we've uh We've uh gone all over the world. Yeah. I think all of these wonderful tech companies should really invest in a fleet of RF 20s for their their employees to ride and show off how their hard work affects their customers. It should. They should. They should. A fleet of bikes. You know, and have it like at like the campuses, right? Like that's what you're going to take, you know? Right? Across like Apple or Google's campus and there's the fleet. You take it and you go and you start that adoption, the seeding there. They're like, "Oh, this is nice." Right? So, yeah, I'm on that same page. Same page. Well, I think we touched on quite a lot of stuff. Um, I did want to ask you before we wrapped it up. I know ANSYS is ANSYS Discovery a lot. But I know there's a family of ANSYS softwares and I didn't know if you wanted to maybe quickly talk about how maybe Discovery is a gateway into other ANSYS products um, or the integration of the family of ANSYS products. Yeah. So, Discovery is a is a great tool from, you know, it's a mixture of things, right? It's it's based off our SpaceClaim architecture. If you guys are familiar with SpaceClaim direct modeling, great with STL scan data reverse engineering. But, you know, that platform was partnered with when we got Discovery. It was partnered with NVIDIA to leverage the the GPU based to to give you that that live physics instantaneously. But as we start progressing, right? It's it's great for design exploration, right? And then we leverage our flagship tools, right? Like we use that's I call flagship tools in ANSYS term, right? Because people in ANSYS know what that is. But for people that don't know what flagship is, we we consider that like our you may have heard of like CFD or Fluent for airflow, structures, you have mechanical, ANSYS Mechanical just turned 50 years old. Fifty years old. Like 50 years old. Mechanical just turned 50 years old. Uh, we had the event. I think maybe you you attended Level Up, which was all around ANSYS Mechanical. Talks about all the so it's just amazing to hear about like our technology how long it's been around. But we integrate with them, right? So like you can go ahead and say, "All right, I I want to now get nitty-gritty on my mesh." Okay, great. You can go and and go into ANSYS Mechanical. A big thing is, we even talked about this offline, was material properties, right? Oh yeah. You look at ANSYS Granta and what you can do there of of breaking down um, like you would no one's using all these cookie cutter ones, right? So, so how do you how do you start figuring out and leveraging all these composites material properties? We were trying to do something with Girl Scouts and like we went to like, "Well, what's the material property of a cookie? Like what can we do to like show like because it's you know a cookie season right now, right? So like just some fun project and just show like convection in an oven and what's the times of it. Just just to nerd out and be like, "Look, this is people never thought about this with simulation, but this is what you can do." Absolutely. It's just the opportunity of and then we get into then now I just like another brave brain length brave wavelen wavelength here of you look at like what we have with our Sherlock products and our HFSS and like how you can look at like the radiation off of like a cell phone to the light beam off of a BMW and how it spreads and I mean, you can really nerd out with some of the the products we have here. You have little demos. You have little demo videos of it and it's like all this stuff like, "What?" I was like, "You could simulate like who would even even thought?" I think that's the biggest thing that surprised me, not surprised me but just wild me coming like now joining ANSYS a couple years ago it's just like, "Woah, like I didn't understand." Really and just like you said earlier, people don't understand and what simulation does, right? Like and how it's used and when you start educating yourself on, "Oh, well, it does do this. This is this is phenomenal, right?" So, to answer your question, Courtney, like as you said, we I think it's like we we did a little we had a team meeting today and we said, "Well, how many products do we have?" There's 75 products, I believe, here at ANSYS. It's a little over I mean, to be honest, it's overwhelming it's overwhelming for me when I started playing with it and that's why I had this uh, I I actually would start going to Discovery. I mean, I still do it now, but I take um, I take my projects into Discovery first because that's where I design it and then from Discovery I push it out to Mechanical and Fluent. Like that's where I that's how I take it usually. I've been doing a lot of parts unless I'm doing just shells for like composites. Then I don't. But if otherwise, if it's a uh, if it's a non-composite part, that's how I do it. It gives me an easy gateway into into Workbench and everything. So, great. Well, I'm I'm more interested in how simulation is perfecting an already perfect Thin Mint with the Girl Scouts. Exactly, right. How could you make it any better? I don't know how you could even attempt to make it better. So, the only way to make a Thin Mint better is put it in the freezer. And you have you guys done that? Oh, yeah. I'm already there. I'm already 10 steps ahead of you. Like that. Like we just sold a boatload the other day because my daughter's in Girl Scouts and and it's just like I was like, man, like this is like I got to like push this inventory out of my garage because I'm going to gain like 7 lb, you know. So, it's just um it's like it's like a religion. Like people love it like and now with COVID, like you they're online now. You can just order it to your door. Yes. And but like the whole enjoyment is like seeing them at like the grocery store and they're like, hey, what's up? And you're like, yeah, sure. Here's 5 bucks, right? But you can't you can't even go door to door but in California, they're not allowed on you. They don't want that. You can't post up. So, when you do post up like in front of your house in a safe environment, people are flooding you because you're like, oh, this is awesome. And you know what we're doing is I bought a fishing pole net that's 6 ft long. So, to make people feel comfortable, you put the money in there, put the cookie, boom, grab it. You know, just to you know, everybody has their own opinion, but just to be safe and right. We're seeing success. So, thanks for asking. Yep. Yeah. Well, we are glad that you came on the podcast today. Thank you for having me. And we I also thank you for taking Arm's phone calls, even though they're so long. Yeah, I apologize. It does it doesn't even matter because it's it's not a I have a customer calling me for support. It's a friend calling a friend. Hey, yo, I need some advice. Oh, what would I do, right? It's I think personally that's the whole key to these uh what I this is what I wake up for every day, right? I think a lot of people do this, right? Like you have these customers you support. I I love doing this. I love working with with people, working with our customers. And and you're going to get the good, the bad, the ugly, right? Like some days I got to play therapist, right? And listen and just be like, yes, I know. I thought that was confidential. I thought that was my job. Right. Yeah. I know you're upset. I'll talk with the development, right? And then there's other days where you know, hey, look, look at what it's done for me and my business. This is where we're going, right? So, it's just you just learn a lot from your customers and I and that's why that's why we're here. So, yeah. I learned a lot today. Well, thank you for having me once again. Yeah, but we'll surely be talking about Ansys going forward as we get through Arm's massive product catalog that's swimming around in his head. Awesome. So, Kurt, thanks for joining us today. Thank you. We thank you for choosing to take some time with us and we look forward to future breakaways. Look for us on Instagram and LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and in person here in Tennessee. We ask our listeners to please share, like, and subscribe. We're available on all major streaming platforms. Thanks for listening. Have a good one. and find some time to break away.