Democratizing CAE with Interactive Multiphysics Simulation and Simulators

The concept of a „physics engine“ emerged in the mid to late 90’s with initiatives from e.g. Havok, Ipion and Mathengine 1 , addressing the computer games market. Initially, focus was on rigid multibody dynamics with contacts and constraints, but this has since extended into e.g. cloth, ropes, elasticity and fluids. The technologies were picked up from the multibody and robotics simulation domains, but physics this has also become an important field in computer graphics research. Physics engines are also relevant for the design of new parallel processors and compute languages. This is why e.g. Havok and PhysX now are owned and developed by Intel and Nvidia, respectively, and why the open source engine, Bullet, is developed in affiliation with AMD.