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Exclusives:Features June
6 , 2001: By Rob MacKay '89 Well, Guido Dhondt, who got a Ph.D. in civil Engineering from Princeton in 1987, has made it simple. This service can be obtained free of charge by surfing the Internet to www.calculix.de. Dhondt, who studies how aircraft engine parts crack and how long it takes until those cracks become dangerous for a subsidiary of Daimler-Chrysler, explains that his invention can be used in any physical discipline where deformations and stresses are an issue - i.e. the car industry, shipbuilding, civil engineering structures, aero engines. It can also be applied in the chemical industry and biomechanics, for instance, to test the suitability of a certain type of prosthesis. "Every engineering job requires some kind of physical solution. For example, the temperature in a cup after it's filled with coffee or the force needed to break a chocolate bar in two halves," explains Dhondt. "In each case, you're looking for a quantity, such as the cup's temperature. Instead of trying to determine the temperature in every point, it's easier to divide the cup in small segments and look for the temperature at the corners of these segments [called "nodes" ]. Mathematically this reduces the problem to a set of linear equations - akin to the old 2x=4, x=2. The CalculiX code can solve these easily." Dhondt, who grew up in Belgium but now lives in Munich, Germany, sees this invention (created with the help of colleague Klaus Wittig) as a constantly changing, worldwide code, a never-ending work-in-progress. "Free means it doesn't cost anything, but it also means freedom of information," he is quick to point out. "We hope to constantly update this code and implement any constructive comments that people give us. Within days after posting the program on the Internet, I got reactions from people all over the world whom I had never heard of before. It is completely unlimited." Luckily, Dhondt just happens to speak English, French, German, Flemish, Dutch, and Italian and reads Latin, Spanish, and Russian. Though his CalculiX model is in cyberspace, Dhondt is still keeping his day job, where he hopes to branch out into researching plastic and creep theories for anisotropic materials. But you can expect him to spend a lot of time refining his hobby. "My dream is to give CalculiX to the entire world, in particular to people who are not able to afford commercial software. I hope that one day this becomes a useful tool in universities throughout the developing world." Rob MacKay is an editor at a weekly newspaper in Queens called the Timesnewsweekly. He can be reached at robertazo@hotmail.com
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