To an engineer, a good design is one that stands up under pressure. Form is important, but function in the face of the forces and stresses an object will encounter during everyday operation is critical. To evaluate physical models, engineers have long had at their disposal a range of testing methods, such as wind tunnels to assess the impact of airflow through and around an object and crash tests to check for structural validity. In recent years, with the growing reliance on digital prototypes over physical ones, computational testing and analysis methods have begun to supplant, or at least complement, experimental ones.
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