FEA Day-to-Day

Practical, real-world guidance you can rely on.

There are a bewildering array of element types, solution types, meshing methods and pre-post processing options that have to be faced when engineers embark on FEA or companies adopt the technique. This is before engineers even get down to the engineering physics behind the problem, with the associated traps and errors. What is needed is guidance via a thorough but practical assessment of the method and how to use it in the real world.

Attendees on this course are shown the background to the FEA methodology, via simple real examples with a minimum of theory. The strength and weaknesses of various FEA techniques are shown and discussed and practical considerations of loadings, boundary conditions and structural details are shown via examples.

The assessment, validation and interpretation of FEA results are vital for delivering safe, effective products are discussed to provide confidence in the results obtained aiming to provide conservative, reliable and qualified results. The attendees join in the activity of building this process themselves and come away with an embryo Procedural Check List. Report writing is also addressed as a class workshop.

The course offers excellent guidance on how to assess and plan the task of carrying out a Finite Element Analysis. A clear understanding of the objectives of each analysis is vital and a road map for achieving this is presented. A review of the trade-off between available resource and analysis methodology is given.

Course Program

This course program contains 5 or 6 parts that combine lectures, discussions, workshops and exercises. These may not be provided in the order presented and timing may vary depending on availability.

Part 1- Basics

• The FEA Process
• Workshop – Your Process?
• Element Stiffness Matrices
• Avoiding ‘Free Motion’
• Degrees of Freedom (DOF)
• Displacement Shape Functions
• Element Types
• Workshop –Which Elements?
• A Check on FEA
• A Simple Case Study
• A Beam Structure Example
  

Part 2 - Specifics

• Controlling Degrees of Freedom (DOF)
• Special Elements
• Workshop – Meshes
• Assessing Stresses
• A Check on FEA
• Convergence Checking
• Local Stress Raisers

• Real World Boundary Conditions and Loading
• Unit Load Cases
• Workshop – What are the Boundary Conditions?
  

Part 3 - Reality

• Making Life Simpler
• FE Model Checks
• Workshop - Meshes Mesh convergence
• Understanding the Objective of the Analysis
• Looking Critically at the CAD Model
• Why Not 20 Million Elements?
  

Part 4 - Understanding

• Extracting Stresses from the FE Model

• Checking the Results
  

Part 5 – Closing (detail depends on timing)

• Workshop - Reporting
• Class Exercise - Check List using Housing Failure
• Best practices
• Conclusions
  

Part 6 – Interest (ONLY for classroom courses)

• History and Background to FEA
• Introduction to Non-linear Analysis
• Introduction to Verification & Validation

All NAFEMS training courses are entirely code independent, meaning they are suitable for users of any software package.

Courses are available to both members and non-members of NAFEMS, although member organisations will enjoy a significant discount on all fees.

NAFEMS course tutors enjoy a world-class reputation in the engineering analysis community, and with decades of experience between them, will deliver tangible benefits to you, your analysis team, and your wider organisation.

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PSE Competencies addressed by this training course