By Dr. Kyle Koppenhoefer and Dr. Scott Anson
We’ve all read the accounts in newspapers and online about manufacturing plants or production facilities that have had incidents or mishaps. It quickly becomes a critical issue when something unexpected happens, causing a system-wide or partial shutdown. Each minute offline means losses throughout the company.
At that point, forensic and computational modeling engineers can come to the rescue. Forensic engineers are specially trained to get to the root cause of an issue, using the evidence they find when an incident involves single or multiple engineering-based processes. Forensic engineers head the team of other experts to recreate exactly what happened leading up to the point of failure. They often partner with computational modeling engineers to prove their theories.
Computational engineers recreate the systems through computer modeling and then run various scenarios until they hit upon the one that matches the evidence, eyewitness accounts, and raw data. Recently, AltaSim Technologies worked to determine the cause of a manufacturing facility shutdown that involved a watertight process.
When the process failed, shutting down operations, the AltaSim team was engaged to begin running computational models to recreate the cause of the failure. No matter what their scenario, they could not precisely recreate the failure. Until the forensic engineering team studied the debris from the accident without bias, the team decided to remove the preconceived notion that water could not enter the system and began running scenarios. One soon matched the evidence, facts, and date. Water had indeed entered the system and caused the failure.
As we have discussed previously, much of engineering is focused on designing and building a product or process. Forensic engineering cleans up the mess when one of those products or processes fails. Computational modeling can be a tremendous help in both instances—before a process failure when it comes to simulating how those designs will work or testing them on humans. After a process has failed, forensic engineers work with simulation engineers to model scenarios to determine the cause of the failure. Much of engineering is focused on designing and building a product or process. Forensic engineering is determining the root cause and preventing recurrence after a failure.
AltaSim Technologies has worked on many manufacturing and process failures to ensure they do not occur again. Computational modeling works well with forensic engineering because both want to apply engineering science to determine precisely what went wrong. We can test whether a hypothesis is correct and recreate it with computational modeling. So many times, the exact cause of the failure has been a Multiphysics problem we have seen before, and we can explain it succinctly, though it may involve complex chemical, fluid flow, heat transfer that produce structural failures.
We must get the science right to solve the production problem and avoid recurrence. It is like building a jigsaw puzzle with the benefit of having the latest and best engineering tools. We develop simulations so others can benefit from correctly using these tools to solve their puzzle.
Dr. Kyle Koppenhoefer is the President of AltaSim Technologies in Worthington, Ohio.
Dr. Scott Anson, P.E., is both the Principal Engineer of Anson Engineering, LLC, and a tenured professor at LeTourneau University in Longview, Texas.