Need advice on choosing FEA software
Need advice on choosing FEA software
(OP)
My company is planning to purchase some analysis software and I need help in deciding which product (or combination of products) is best for our specific needs. We use Pro/E for our mechanical design work, and most of the parts we design are Aluminum. We are primarily interested in the stresses and deformations that our assemblies will face when subjected to shock and vibration conditions at temperatures ranging from -40 C to +70 C. We are also interested in heat transfer analysis.
We have virtually no prior experience using FEA tools, but we want to have some capability to do this in-house. We will be using the analysis software only occasionally, and cannot justify a dedicated FEA Engineer. Our budget for the software is fairly generous, but we don't want to invest a lot of time or money on training. Please offer me your advice on which product (or combination of products) makes the most sense for our circumstance.
We have virtually no prior experience using FEA tools, but we want to have some capability to do this in-house. We will be using the analysis software only occasionally, and cannot justify a dedicated FEA Engineer. Our budget for the software is fairly generous, but we don't want to invest a lot of time or money on training. Please offer me your advice on which product (or combination of products) makes the most sense for our circumstance.





RE: Need advice on choosing FEA software
However, it probably makes more sense in the first place to get something that will integrate more tightly wth ProE, but I have no experience with that... and for what it is worth we do NOT generally use the FEA that is integrated with our solid modelling package.
Cheers
Greg Locock
RE: Need advice on choosing FEA software
RE: Need advice on choosing FEA software
RE: Need advice on choosing FEA software
Riaan de Jager
Mechanical Projects Engineer
British American Tobacco Manufacturers
South Africa
RE: Need advice on choosing FEA software
I would recommend that you settle in on a pre/post processor (like FEMAP) and then look for codes that FEMAP supports (there are several). It appears that what you are trying to analyze is not too complicated and that all of the FE codes on the market should be capable of solving. If you want the FEMAP pre/post processor and a solver something like MSC Nastran but don't want to spend the money, you should look at CAEFEM, which offers a full range of capabilities at a fraction of the cost of MSC Nastran. CAEFEM is available at the following website:
http://www.caefem.com
pj
RE: Need advice on choosing FEA software
Jack M. Kleinfeld, P.E. Kleinfeld Technical Services, Inc.
Infrared Thermography, Finite Element Analysis, Process Engineering
www.KleinfeldTechnical.com
RE: Need advice on choosing FEA software
ANSYS and Abaqus have full pre and post processing capabilities together with the solver in a single dedicated package. These can also read in CAD drawings if that's what you want. Nastran I don't know, but that is also popular.
Personally though, if you don't have someone who knows what they're doing then, as with most computers, if you put garbage in you'll get garbage out. Training can be as worthwhile an investment as much as buying the right software.
corus
http://www.corusresearch.com
RE: Need advice on choosing FEA software
RE: Need advice on choosing FEA software
As far as I know, ls_dyna is good at shock analysis, but still there are some limitations for its application, and i think such limitations are due to the assumptions it bases, this is the case for any computing software.
And if you want to do some nonlinear analysis and want to get a farely accurate as well as reasonable result, I reconmmand ABAQUS, since v6.3 is a great solver than v6.2, also it can offer a complete solutions for contact problem. But i dont know how it is for heat transfer problem.
and I was heard from my friends that ANASYS is good at couple-field problem, maybe you can try to refer to the theory manual of ANSYS since it publishes independently.
Good luck!
RE: Need advice on choosing FEA software
I have experience working with Samcef V10 and with the new great interface Samcef Field (more user frinedly). I'm not sure, but i believe is cheaper than ansys , abaqus , MSC Nastran, etc.
www.samtech.fr
RE: Need advice on choosing FEA software
RE: Need advice on choosing FEA software
I just joined the forum so my suggestion might be a little late. But anyway, every software vendor may tell you that their product is best and it can do lots of things. Usually this confuses us further as to which is best. In my opinion, you should pick a few software vendors (maybe one or two or three would be sufficient) and ask them to help you run some examples of the things that you do as an evaluation process. Compare the results with for example your experiments or any data or calculations. Then just get the software that can do the job properly. Of course, good technical or after sales support is also important. I hope this helps.
RE: Need advice on choosing FEA software
I believe that ANSYS has a license to resell LS-Dyna so that they can sell you an implicit and an explicit solver, but I don't believe that these models can be built from their preprocessor and I doubt you can send results between the two.
I also believe that MSC will sell you Dyna along with their solvers. I am guessing that Patran will write Dyna decks as well as decks for MSC products as well.
Besides these, I think it will be tough to find an integrated explicit/implicit/pre and post processing solution.
Best regards and good luck!
-KF9RI
RE: Need advice on choosing FEA software