Pushing Boundaries- A look at wider uses of FEA

Since its inception in the 1940s, finite element analysis—originally developed for numerical solution of complex problems in structural mechanics—has become established in nearly all engineering fields, including bioengineering, where it plays a role in studying many parts of the body, such as nasal passages.

January saw the death of British mathe-matician Olgierd Cecil Zienkiewicz, an early pioneer of the finite element method who pushed for its computerization and who recognized the potential for using the method to solve problems outside solid mechanics, purview of the famous Euler-Bernoulli beam equation.

With the rapid decline in the cost of computers and the concomitant increase in computing power, today’s personal computers can now produce accurate FEA results . As the expert tutor Samer Adeeb ( an assistant professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Alberta in Edmonton) says " FEA has been around forever, but it’s grown to be very powerful because of the computational power that exists right now in computers.”

Today, high-end FEA software packages are available to solve complex problems across many disciplines. But they’re still not perfect; that is, the engineers and researchers who use these tools can spend a lot of time kitting them out and programming them for their own unique use.

Other FEA packages introduced within the past 15 years are now commonly integrated with computer-aided design applications, allowing product developers to analyze as they design. The integration is intended to speed up the design cycle because designers can analyze, then immediately update, their designs.

Beginning in the 1960s, FEA researchers began to extend the method beyond linear structural analysis to nonlinear FEA and other engineering disciplines such as fluid dynamics, heat transfer, soil mechanics, wave propagation, and electromagnetics. FEA is now used by disparate industries for a range of applications. The packaging industry calls upon it to analyze designs for blow-molded products, including bottles, top. Bioengineers call upon the software for their own use, such as studying the growth of a human bone, bottom and its stretch into unrelated fields such as the simulation of weather patterns.

As a numerical technique, FEA allows engineers to find approximate solutions of partial differential and integral equations. FEA software simulates where structures bend or twist and indicates the distribution of stresses and displacements. The software uses a complex system of points to form a grid, or mesh, across a model. The engineer assigns nodes at a particular density throughout the material, often depending on the expected stress levels of a certain area. The mesh contains the material and structural properties that define how the part will react to certain load conditions.

However , to get meaningful analysis results, designers need to know how to identify the problem that needs solving in the first place. That requires at least a basic understanding of the finite method. Before beginning analysis, designers will need to simplify the problem at hand, to ask themselves whether the problem is linear or nonlinear, and to identify the forces that need to be analyzed.

It’s sometimes too easy to toggle back and forth between CAD and FEA without really knowing what you’re doing. So,some people end up abusing FEA because it offers such a nice animation; so they try to get to the animation they want rather than to actually solve a problem that returns useful information.

To get meaningful analysis results, designers need to know how to identify the problem that needs solving in the first place. That requires at least a basic understanding of the finite method, he added. Before beginning analysis, designers will need to simplify the problem at hand, to ask themselves whether the problem is linear or nonlinear, and to identify the forces that need to be analyzed.

Companies that hire designers to perform both CAD and FEA should offer new employees an introductory course to FEA. Otherwise what they’re doing is just an animation, and that doesn’t differ from a computer scientist who is just drawing on the computer.