NAFEMS in Canada: The Engineering Simulation Roadshow - Toronto

16 September 2026
Toronto Marriott City Centre, One Blue Jays Way, Toronto, ON M5V 1J4

The roadshow reaches Toronto for its second stop. This day looks at what happens when simulation moves out of product design and into manufacturing itself, with a keynote on process simulation for polymer composites alongside Dominique Madier's model verification training. The thread running through it is the same at every stop: how do you know your model is right? Open to members and non-members.

Keynote: Taking simulation from design into manufacturing

Dr Deepak S. Gupta

Finite element methods are routine in developing polymer composite products, but far less common in developing the processes that make them. This keynote shows how rigorous 3-D dynamic modelling, validation and optimisation were applied to injected pultrusion, a continuous process for producing prismatic composite parts in high volume.

Starting from bench-scale university research, the CFD models beat a 15% accuracy target on experimental validation, then went to work at a major manufacturer to intensify production of pultruded window parts. The results were substantial: die fabrication time cut by 75% and cost by 66% inside a year. The talk also covers the human side of the change, from winning plant-floor buy-in and building capability to moving CAE methods from academic research into accepted industrial practice.

Dr Deepak S. Gupta is an executive leader and founder with more than two decades of R&D leadership across the US and Canada. His recent roles include Associate Vice President of Research and Innovation at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and Chief Learning Officer at the Quantum Algorithms Institute, both in Metro Vancouver. He holds a bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and master's and doctoral degrees from Washington University in Saint Louis, all in chemical engineering.

Training session: The Model Verification Toolkit

Led by Dominique Madier, Founder and Director, FEA Academy. Most FEA errors are built into a model before the solver runs, and most are avoidable. In this working session Dominique walks through the checks that show whether a model is mathematically sound and whether it reflects physical reality, then covers test-analysis correlation.

Topics include:

• Accuracy checks against mathematical checks, and the verification against validation distinction
• Singularities, mechanisms, and the epsilon vector
• Weight, applied load, and reacted load checks
• Free-free modal and ground checks
• Unit gravity, unit enforced displacement, and free thermal strain checks
• A structured pre-solve verification checklist
• Test-analysis correlation: strain gauge measurement, FEM strain extraction, validation factor calculation, and correlation plotting

Dominique Madier is a senior FEA consultant with over 25 years of experience and more than 40,000 hours of NASTRAN modelling, and the founder of FEA Academy. Full session breakdown and biography are on the roadshow programme page.

N​ote - all prices are in US Dollars (USD)

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About NAFEMS

NAFEMS is the International Association for the Engineering Modelling, Analysis and Simulation Community, a not-for-profit organisation that has supported the global simulation community for over 40 years. The day includes a short briefing on NAFEMS membership, technical resources, working groups, PSE Certification and our event programme.