FEA Information

FEA Information
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Posted by: Ken Barnett ^®

06/03/2006, 19:56:08

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Hi there all
I am interested in any feedback anyone can provide on their FEA experience.
I am a professional engineer but have not had any real experience with FEA. I have a project which now requires it, so I am investigating whether I can learn this in a suitable time frame or have this work done externally by a specialist FEA firm.
We work with Solidworks and they have a COSMOS package available.I have also made preliminary investigations into ABAQUS and NASTRAN.
The literature goes into a lot of FEA jargon which i am not that familiar with, so i am interesetd in whether i can realistically get up to speed with FEA.
Broken down,our project is really just a number of beams but these are odd shapes (welded high tensile plate construction). I have static and dynamic loads to consider with the end aim of proving a suitable design life i.e. fatigue analysis
Any comments/info appreciated
Thanks
KEN

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Re: FEA Information

Re: FEA Information -- Ken Barnett Post Reply Top of thread Forum

Posted by: ipajewsk ^®

06/05/2006, 09:56:36

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I don't know how much time you would be willing to spend properly learning FEA, but my first reaction would be to say simply go ahead and find a specialist firm.
Simply put, FEA is simply a numerical method of solving a mathematical model of a real world problem. Problems are most often encountered when the engineer's model doesn't reflect the physical situation, and the engineer doesn't realize it. How can you ensure that you have developed an accurate model, when you yourself don't completely understand the model yourself? Because of that, you would need to spend some time learning at least the rudiments of FEA's mathematical foundations. That brings to mind variational calculus, linear algebra and some other non-sensical jargon. Its not exactly an easy or quick thing to get up to speed on.
Now, I know alot of commercial FEA programs make a big commotion about how "anyone" can use their programs. And yes, anyone can do an FEA analysis, to some extent. I'm sure a monkey could actually produce results out of one of the commercial packages available. I think that its okay for FEA novices to use this tool in a typical design process, for comparative purposes or preliminary analysis. But, for a final validation analysis, I think the engineer truely needs to understand FEA.
Hope this helped.

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Re: FEA Information
Re: FEA Information -- Ken Barnett	Post Reply	Top of thread	Forum