FEA for Biomedical Testing Standards
FEA for Biomedical Testing Standards
(OP)
Hello all, my company is looking into developing some in-house FEA capability. We use SolidWorks, so I am thinking that COSMOSWorks or neiWorks would be best for us at this point. As a smaller company, we do not have any dedicated FEA/FEM people so the program needs to be relatively easy to use.
I have two questions on that line:
Do you feel that we can get reasonable analysis out of these "lighter" programs? Assuming of course the operator is competent.
Does anybody know of any computer simulation programs that are set up to mimic ASTM standard tests? (specifically in the biomedical field for my purposes)
I realize you can try almost anything with any program, but if a certain program was better suited I'd love to hear about it.
I have two questions on that line:
Do you feel that we can get reasonable analysis out of these "lighter" programs? Assuming of course the operator is competent.
Does anybody know of any computer simulation programs that are set up to mimic ASTM standard tests? (specifically in the biomedical field for my purposes)
I realize you can try almost anything with any program, but if a certain program was better suited I'd love to hear about it.





RE: FEA for Biomedical Testing Standards
As to getting reasonable analysis from "lighter" programs: I think the fundamental problem is that the good FEA modeling requires an almost obsessive compulsive attitude toward detail, control, and error checking that is philosophically incompatible with the CAD-IN "black box" approach of “click it and go”. My experience is that CAD-IN FEA is to be used by designers with no or little FEA training (who are already very busy trying to do design work). Without the fundamental training in FEA (and I don’t mean just training in how to use the software), the designer has no idea how to error check or validate his model (or why he has to). Who would trust that situation? As an experience FEA user, I would find the limitations of many CAD-IN offerings to restrictive to allow me the modeling power and error checking detail that I would require.
If the choice of FEA is economic, then as a provider of FEA services primarily for medical device manufacturers, I don’t think my clients can meet the requirements to have in house FEA capability (research software, buy, train on specific software, train on FEA principles, implement quality control protocols) in a more cost effective way than I can provide those services as specialize vendor (who can spread the costs over several clients).
www.probasci.com -
Implantable FEA for medical device manufacturers
RE: FEA for Biomedical Testing Standards
We are not looking to supplant physical testing, I don't know when the FDA will allow virtual testing results in place of "real" ones - we are just looking to get ballpark figures for how our constructs will perform.
RE: FEA for Biomedical Testing Standards
Here's a link to some cool software I came across.
http://www.materialise.com/mimics/main_ENG.html
Paul P.