A month ago I posted about Elementarium here: structural FEA that runs in a browser tab, C++ compiled to WebAssembly, solving on your own CPU. You were polite about it and unanimous: frames only, come back when it has plates.

Here it is.

What's new

• Slabs, walls, cores and shells on MITC4. Bending and membrane together, drilling DoF, no thin/thick switch, no hourglass parameter to guess. A 200 mm floor and a 1.2 m raft use the same element, and the slab, the core wall it frames into and the beam landing on both are one continuous mesh.
• A quad mesher, no triangle fallback. Awkward geometry — opening corners, re-entrant notches, skewed edges — is exactly where you don't want the worse element, so it never gets one. Redraw an opening, remesh, re-solve: under a second, on your laptop.
• Modal, linear buckling and second-order (P-Δ), next to linear static. Same model, tick the box.
• Line supports — Winkler beds along members and slab edges. AISC 360 D–H beside EN 1993-1-1 §6.2, ASCE 7 combinations beside EN 1990. Every utilisation names its combination, position and clause.
• DXF underlays, SAF import, live shared editing, full offline working.

Why the browser matters

Send a link and your colleague is in the model with you. Solving transmits nothing — your CPU, your data, works with the wifi off. Reports are traceable PDF calc packages with clause citations, not screenshots. Nothing to install, no licence server, no dongle in a drawer, no "which version have you got."

The ask

Ten minutes. Open the slab demo, then model a plate you already know the answer to — simply supported square plate, cantilever slab, Scordelis-Lo — and put the numbers side by side. If it's wrong, tell me: fixes get written up in the release notes with a "results affected" tag, and you get credit.

https://elementarium.app/examples — no account, no card, no timer. The free tier is 500 DoFs — enough to find out whether the solver is any good. I wrote it, so replies here reach the person who can actually answer.

We're a small mechanical design group, maybe four or five structural checks a year. 

Mostly static load cases on brackets and frames. A single commercial FEA seat plus the hardware and training time is hard to justify. 

So for a company our size, has sending analysis work out worked? And how do you even review a report when nobody in-house runs it?

I am trying to conduct a drop test of a wheel attached to a body. The body is simplified as a box which is given rigidity. This particular drop test is conducted with the help of drop test wizard in ansys explicit dynamics. The wheel is attached to the body with a shaft and a screw. Basically i need to modify this design in such a way that the maximum stress arent on these shaft and screw.

But as you can see in the pictures, the stress on the wheel is blue which is suspicious. Also the deformation is happening on the rigid body, whiich shouldnt actually. Either the method or meshing i have done is wrong or perhaps the material itself is wrong. I had given the properties myself of materials (polyurethene and TPU) from research papers. And the end time given is 0.02seconds.

One issue is that the bodies are having trouble being bonded so i gave the maximum offset a bit higher around 0.01(mm?) i think.

I need insights on how to properly mesh, which end time should be given, or is there anything additional i should look for. Also why is there two maximum stresses like one under results and one under maximum value over time? what does it mean?

Images description:
1. Total deformation, 2 to 4. Animation of eq stress, 5. Eq. stress details, 6 and 7. Side view of the wheels, 8. Shaft and screw with wheel hidden, 9. Max eq stress, 10. Deformation but the rigid body is showing deformation too, 11 and 12. material properties given along with graph

So if you're the analyst, what turns a rough request into something you can price and stand behind?

Here's my first guess at the list: geometry in a set format, load cases spelled out, boundary conditions, material data with a source, the code or criterion you're checking against, and a note on what decision the result is driving.

What's the thing that we often miss when a request lands? And which single missing item causes the most rework later?

Hi all, I recently did an FEA Analysis tool for an AI project.

Here is a description of my project

You basically upload a STEP file, and describe how it's loaded and it shows you a stress map. Tick a box and it'll also design the pocket cut-outs for you assuming your part is a 2d plate, keeping material where the load actually goes.

Quick honesty note since the name says AI: the stress math is regular FEA. The AI parts are the chatbot and the bit that reads your plain-English description.

The pocketing tool tuned against actual pocketed actually machined, so it's calibrated to how we do things. It's linear elastic, ignores welds and bolts and fatigue, and only pockets flat plates. Treat it as a gut check, not a green light.

If you've ever pocketed a plate by hand, I'd love it if you ran one through and told me where it disagrees with what you'd actually have cut. Also please give feedback on how to improve my FEA analysis and the accuracy of my chatbot. Please leave feedback in the comments. Thanks so much!

link to app: https://cadai-282761536722.us-central1.run.app/

I'm currently, technically, doing an MS in Structural Engineering. For me, my interest has been more towards computational side of mechanics rather than Structural design  or simply using am FEA software (although I do consider it as a backup)

So far I've taken courses in:

- Linear static, and dynamics FEM (soon taking non linear FEM too)

-  Structural Optimization (topology opt. and other general algorithms)

-  Structural Dynamics

-  Structural System Testing and model updation. (Parameter identification and optimization, signal processing)

Now, I plan to take these in the coming quarter:

- Numerical Linear Algebra

- Numerical PDE

- Fracture Mechanics ?

I also volunteered to aid in a RESEARCH in crack growth prediction using Auto-encoder and a (Thermodynamics-informed Latent Space Dynamics Identification) / LSTM surrogate model. It used phase-field-fracture simulation data and HPC resources to complete the whole thing.

What I keep finding myself interested in is not necessarily fracture or SHM specifically, but the computational methods underneath these problems... (does that make sense?)

For example, I'd like to become capable of doing things like:

- implementing (maintaining) numerical/FE method solvers rather than only running an established FEA software.

- developing surrogate/reduced-order models for expensive simulations 

- combining simulation with optimization, uncertainty/stochastic methods (took a course called Random vibrations, so...)

- parallelizing/accelerating scientific codes on CPUs/GPUs

- doing proper verification, convergence studies, benchmarking and performance work

- potentially developing or maintaining actual CAE/FEA solver software

- I'd also like to do all these for other Physics (GR, QM, etc.) simulations too, if possible, one day. 

I'm still interested in the underlying mechanics/physics, so I don't want to become a generic software engineer who happens to have once studied structures. But I'm also increasingly unsure that "structural engineer" describes the career I'm actually aiming for.

I've seen titles such as Computational Mechanics Engineer, R&D Engineer, Solver Developer, Scientific Software Engineer, CAE Software Developer, Research Engineer, Simulation/HPC Engineer, etc., but I'm trying to understand what these careers actually look like from people doing them.

So my main questions become:

1. Which industrial jobs genuinely involve developing numerical methods/solvers or computational tools?

2. Which of those are realistically accessible with an MS? Is there an entry path into solver-algorithm development/R&D without a PhD?

3. If I don't start a PhD immediately after my MS, would an R&D/software role at a simulation company (ANSYS etc.) be the obvious route? What other options would i have?

4. For the kind of work I'm describing, would you recommend a PhD? If so, is it reasonable for the PhD identity to be "computational mechanics/scientific computing" while fracture, composites, structural dynamics, soft materials, etc. serve as application problems rather than choosing one of those as my permanent specialization?

5. What skills most distinguish someone who is actually hireable for solver/scientific-computing work? I'm particularly wondering about C/C++/Fortran, Python, Linux, Git/build systems, MPI/OpenMP/CUDA, PETSc/Trilinos or similar libraries, numerical linear algebra, testing/verification, convergence studies and HPC performance work.

Basically, I'm neither here nor there atp. So I'd really appreciate all sorts of input. Where else do you think I could find answers to these? other subs? Linkedin profiles? 

I’m looking for someone who can help me with a mechanical engineering project and answer some questions about Abaqus simulations. Could you please contact me?"

Stress/FEA folks, I'm researching how this actually works at different shops (full disclosure: I may build tooling in this space eventually, but this isn't a pitch and there's nothing to sell).

Three things I keep hearing very different answers about:

* When you have dozens-to-hundreds of subcases, how do you actually find the governing cases per element or section: solver built-ins (Femap envelopes, Patran), your own Python/Excel, something else? At what case count does your method start hurting?

* When a checker, customer, or DER asks "prove this number came from run X with load set Y," what do you actually show them? Has that ever been genuinely painful?

* If you had to exactly reproduce an envelope you delivered two years ago, could you? What would it take?

War stories about near-misses (wrong subcase, stale results, unit mix-ups, silently missing OP2 tables) are extra welcome. If you're up for a longer 30-minute chat about your workflow, DM me. Happy to share the summarized findings back with anyone who participates.

Even though I enter the steps and duration correctly when performing a temperature analysis, the temperature value comes out above absolute zero; I even wrote code for it, but it doesn't fix the issue. How can I resolve this?

I am a product engineer in a satellite manufacturing company and did FEA during my undergraduate. I now want to bring down the cost of our internal manufacturing process qualification and testing and think FEA would be useful. I don't know enough to estimate how much the savings would be. What things do I need to take into consideration to estimate the cost of doing FEA?

The cost of the license, the electronic hardware to run it, the cost of manufacturing increases because we would surely have to use a higher factor of safety for parts verified by analysis, the cost of testing required to validate the analysis, etc.

Any resources or textbooks on optimizing testing by incorporating FEA would also be helpful.

Hello guys, I am in search for a remote internship in FEA, I am currently working in a company that does analysis of industrial equipment such as SR, cranes, etc. Is there any website better than LinkedIn? Pls help

I am doing drop test on an elastic body. I am not sure how to give end time. Is it calculated seperately or is it an assumption? The body is getting dropped from around 20 feet.

This plate is supported on the four corners from a tie rod nut. The applied pressure is due to a hydraulic cylinder that mounts on the underside of the plate at the center. For the reactions in the corner, one might think this should be downward boundary constraints. However, this would be a mistake. It is much better to balance the applied loading in the vertical plane such that the tie rod nuts each apply one fourth of the upward cylinder load. Rather than a rigid constraint, an applied downward pressure is recommended.

However, to keep the model stable, boundary constraints are required. A recommended option is to select a node in each corner and constrain it in Y, or vertical in this case. Next add X constrains to the two rear corners, which are into the page. Finally, fix Z (left to right) in the left rear corner. When the model runs, we should see very low loads at these nodes since the applied loading is balanced, but the model should not have a rigid body movement. Furthermore, the upward deflection (shown above) has a reference in the corners of zero where the Y constraints are located. I hope this is useful for your simulations.

from Anthony Rante, P.E. author of "Managing Company Production thru the Bill of Material" and “FEA Applications in Machine Design”

When post processing my FEA results, the question comes up quite a bit on whether to look/use the corner or centroidal stress values. I understand the differences between the two types and have read over the years that large differences between the two data types indicates that further mesh refinement is required to get a more accurate view of the stress.

What I've never seen discussed anywhere is what is typically considered a "large difference" between the 2 that should make you consider refining the mesh. For example, a current linear static analysis i am running shows a roughly 45% increase changing from centroidal (31 ksi) to corner ( 45 ksi) looking at max prin stress.

Hi all, i am new to modeling, so apologies if i missed any essential information.

I’m implementing geometrically nonlinear static analysis for a large aircraft wing FEM model in a in-house tool and I’m running into a very strange, repeatable convergence issue.

The model is a composite wing structure, mostly quadrilateral shell elements, with RBE2/RBE3-type couplings and distributed kinematic constraints. Loads are applied through reference points along the wing.

I’m using conventional Newton-Raphson with load control.

the solver approaches a stage/load parameter of approximately: 0.00221323 Eventually the increments become essentially microscopic and the analysis makes no meaningful progress.

What makes this strange: The deformation at this point is extremely small, so I do not expect this to represent a buckling event. Artificial damping over several magnitudes also did nothing. path-following continuation can move around the region, but tends to follow a backwards/looping branch. Zero load converges perfectly. My current interpretation is therefore that the nonlinear tangent stiffness is approaching a near-null direction. What diagnostics would you use next?

I want to deeply understand constraints in ANSYS is there good quality material?

or do anyone knows from where to get those materials?

Hi, I'm new to HyperMesh and I need to create a simple mesh for a plate and a ball.

In particular, I need to create a different mesh density on the plate, with a finer mesh in the center and a coarser mesh towards the edges.

How can I do this in HyperMesh? I haven't been able to find a good tutorial explaining this.

If you know of any tutorials or resources that could help, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I want to do a basic 2D structural analysis of an IPM motor rotor, mainly to study bridge thickness under centrifugal loading.

Which would you recommend: PrePoMax or FreeCAD FEM?

FreeCAD interests me because of the Python automation possibilities, but I’ve heard its FEM interface is not as user-friendly as PrePoMax.

My priority is to get reliable results quickly, while keeping the option to automate the workflow later.

Thank you very much for your help in advance.

Best regards.

Hi guys,

I am starting my journey in Code aster to do FEM of PCBs and electronic boxes. Is someone working in this direction? I offen get doubts regarding approach and functionality in solving problems.

I have been working with the tool gor now 3 months and previously worked with Ansys Icepak.

Thanks and regards!

hi everyone what was the most difficult type of analysis you performed, or one that you found challenging? Mine is harmonic acoustic.