If you want to improve structural and component designs significantly, guess which software you should use. You’ve got it! FEA software.
Finite Element Software simulates how a product reacts to real-world forces like heat, vibration, fluid flow, and other effects. You can easily optimize your design for real-world applications.
But what are the real-world design applications? Today we’re going to give you a few examples.
1. FEA Software: Heat Transfer
You can use heat transfer modules in the software to analyze temperature distribution. This occurs in static and transient heat transfer processes.
Unfortunately, FEA can only measure conductive heat transfer. This means you must approximate the other two kinds of heat transfer (convection and radiation) by boundary conditions.
You can combine FEA with Computational Fluid Dynamics to measure all three types of heat transfer.
2. Dynamic Stress and Vibration of Structures
The vibrations you’ll be interested in when using analysis software come from construction activities, traffic, and blasting activities.
With software, you can automate and customize solutions for your structural problems. It’s easy to parameterize and analyze more than one design scenario at once.
Often, software suites allow you to plug other tools into the data and verify your findings.
3. Modal Analysis
This is one of the most common types of FEA. It’s a basic tenant most engineers need to understand before they can use the software.
Modal analysis is an easy way to calculate your system’s natural frequencies. You can easily figure out what frequencies are dangerous or destructive.
There isn’t load in modal analysis. Why? Because it’s only related to geometry and not loading. Your resonance frequencies change based on the shape your model takes and only by the way it’s constrained.
4. Sheet Metal Forming Analysis
Stamping, or sheet metal forming, is a stretching process between the punch and the die. Analysis allows companies to test the performance of dies and process before trying them out.
There are two divisions in the use of FEA on sheet metal forming. Inverse one step checks the deformation potential of the finished blank or original sheet metal. The engineer then flips this model and uses it to predict the final outcome.
Incremental analysis uses a mesh to simulate the blank’s deformation within the tools. It’s a linear analysis. The engineer computes forward from beginning shape to final shape.
Sheet metal forming analysis is common in the auto industry. Nissan used metal forming simulations to solve a tearing problem in their metal stamping line. Based on the information, they created a new die design and solved their problem.
Save Yourself Headaches
A wise carpenter once said, “measure twice, cut once.” In engineering, the same could be said.
It’s easy to say, “my calculations are correct.” But making assumptions could land you in a world of trouble.
Hire the team to run the FEA software. You’ll create a safer product, you’ll improve productivity, but overall, you’ll save money.