How to stay in practice with FEA

[EngineerDave]

Question,

I learned FEA in a full year of classes at the local university. I was planning to apply this to a new job at work, but due to downsizing I lost out on this opportunity.

I was looking for some recommendations on how to stay in practice with it.

I have access to ANSYS and IDEAS at the university and I have a demo version of MSC/Nastran at home that I'm not too familar with yet. For CAD I have Solid Edge.

Are there any good tutorials to keep practicing with to keep this skill up?

 

[hwong]

Hi EngineerDave,

It is good you have access to the softwares as well as what you personally have to aid self learning. Tutorials wise, it would be great to attend CAE courses as techniques taught as well as the notes they provide would be a trampoline to your CAE skill. Well, the only concern would be cost.

So I would like to present my suggestion to you given your committment to improve your skill.

Tutorials are mainly guides on how to use the softwares and get an idea how to get specific analysis done. So the next step is to improve the skill to perform analysis to give actual designing and prototyping more confidence.

So how we can do this might be as follows. Online are many information on actual experiments and test results. So first step is to look for what we want to specialize in or within the scope of our specialization.

Obvious is to begin with individual parts and progress to assembly analysis, linear to non-linear as well as single factor to multiple factors (multi-physics).

The idea is to pre-process sufficient conditioning (not detailed as in high mesh numbers or physical conditions... you know what i mean, just elaborating, dun mind) and see if we are able to obtain CAE results which is meaningful as in correlational to the actual test results. Analysis should be what the software is capable of. For novel analysis, that's where data correlationing comes in for confidence. A few test cases would be better provided you have the time and resource.

Well, there may be suitable tutorials online, but I have not found any close to my work... highly confidential sometimes in terms of material, result, analysis and conditioning data I guess in the industry.

Anyway, it is a challenge to us to try out ourselves sometimes when we have the time after we are trained or familiar with the softwares. Help and assistance from fellow members is definitely swell! So all the best to your endeavour.