Students at UConn’s School of Engineering will now have access to valuable engineering software, thanks to a new partnership. 

ANSYS, Inc., a Pittsburgh-based company that develops engineering simulation software, will provide UConn’s students with its powerful engineering simulation software. Because ANSYS software is used extensively by engineering companies around the world, access to it will greatly boost the students’ value as potential employees. The ANSYS software will also be used extensively to support research activities across the School. 

The partnership provides UConn’s engineering faculty and students with academic and research licenses of ANSYS software across their entire product line including licenses for HPC (high performance computing). The software that ANSYS is providing to UConn is widely used within the engineering profession, said Vito Moreno, a professor in the department of mechanical engineering who runs the Mechanical Engineering  Department’s Senior Design Program. He added that ANSYS is the software used by many of the corporate sponsors of the design program, in which senior students take on different engineering challenges and seek solutions to them.

“So here’s a chance to work on a real-world problem by applying this software, and that really helps the transition from students to working professionals,”  Moreno said.

Baki Cetegen, head of the mechanical engineering department, called the partnership a “win-win arrangement between UConn engineering and ANSYS.”

“This allows our students to learn to use the state-of-the-art computational software for fluid dynamics, structural and thermal analyses to analyze complex engineering problems,” Cetegen said. “Their experience with learning and using these tools make them highly desirable for a large number of employers who use the same software.”