That was a nifty article on zcar.com, especially the part about OCC running finite element analysis on their parts. Are these guys engineers?
I wonder about SolidWorks being distributed with FEA softare. Aside from companies with poorly supervised designers, you have any number of pirate copies of SolidWorks being installed on home computers by people who would only be too happy to do freelance work for you.
FEA apparently means that we can all do structural analysis of anything we want to. The computer is a magic box that knows the answers to all our questions.
What happens when something thus analyzed, fails? Perhaps someone lacked the 3D perceptual skills and knowledge to apply the forces and reactions correctly. Perhaps they did not understand the significance of heat treatment or work hardening in the material specification, or the need to specify workmanship standards. Perhaps they did not know that their design is governed by safety regulations. "Yes, I can analyze that boiler for you. I have FEA!"
I would be interested in knowing who is liable if some FEA operator gets overconfident, and he and his supervisors are not professional engineers. Could this trickle back to the CAD vendor?
JHG
p.s. For the record, I am not a Professional Engineer. I am a Certified Engineering Technologist.
drawoh,
Good point. but you should start a new thread on this subject. ps, I work with such engineers that think they are "certified" to use FEA...then the actual product fails.
Chris
Sr. Mechanical Designer, CAD
SolidWorks 05 SP0.1 / PDMWorks 05 ctopher's home site
