Dr. Flavio Souza is the Director of Product Management at Siemens Digital Industries Software, Inc., responsible for the Materials Engineering product line. Dr. Souza joined Siemens through the acquisition of MultiMechanics, Inc. Dr. Souza was the Founder, President and CEO/CTO of MultiMechanics, Inc, a US-based company focused on speeding up innovation and adoption of advanced materials through computational multiscale material modelling.
Dr. Souza has a BSc in Civil Engineering, an MSc in Transportation Engineering and a PhD in Engineering Mechanics. He has received numerous awards for Research & Innovation in the field of computational multiscale mechanics and fracture in heterogenous viscoelastic materials, including the Petrobras Technology Award for innovative development in the field of computational mechanics, sponsored by Petrobras, one of the world’s largest oil companies.
Dr. Souza is an active reviewer for highly renowned international peer-reviewed journals in the field of computational engineering, has served as committee member in various BSc, MSc and PhD work, and has authored or co-authored more than fifty articles in international scientific journals, conferences or book chapters, as well as invented patented technologies. Dr Souza is also a member of The Materials, Minerals and Metals Society (TMS), which seeks to develop and strengthen the minerals, metals, and materials community in the USA.
Building a Materials Engineering Software Product: From Academic Research to Commercialization
During my undergraduate studies, I was amazed by innovative products, especially software products, and wanted to pursue a path where I could somehow advance the field of engineering through innovative approaches and technologies. In my graduate studies, I was presented to the theory of viscoelasticity and multiscale modeling techniques by my academic supervisors at Universidade Federal do Ceara (Brazil) and University of Nebraska-Lincoln (USA). At that point, I recognized an opportunity to further develop the theory and eventually build a software product that could fill the gap of existing finite element software when it comes to modeling advanced materials including highly heterogeneous viscoelastic media, e.g. fiber-reinforced thermosets and thermoplastics composites. In this presentation, I will outline the path to developing a software product based on knowledge built through academic research and founding the startup MultiMechanics Inc. With a growing team, we embarked on a path to build a valuable solution to accelerate innovation and adoption of advanced materials, while partnering with customers and industrial players to further mature and commercialize the product centered on TRUE Multiscale technology for a wide range of material-driven applications. The latest step has been the M&A with Siemens Digital Industries Software, through which our team has become the foundation of a new product line – Simcenter 3D Materials Engineering.
