StressCheck from ESRD

[knutf]

Hello
Have any one of you any experience or knowledge about this product?

How does it compare to other FEA software like Ansys, NeNastran, designstar.

KnutF

 

[fkmeyers]

It is a p-element product that is good for modeling stress concentrations. The guy that did mechanica has something to do with it. As I understand it is limited to certain shapes and is not a general purpose FEA product like Nastran or ANSYS. I would not compare it with other general purpose FEA products but might consider it as an additional tool for certain specific applications.

 

[EVdave13]

We use it for just this purpose. It is like the opposite of nastran. Nastran gives you incredible control over details and tools for building models from geometry, but setting up for runs and pulling results can be tedious. In stresscheck, if what you need to model isn't in the handbook, you have to do it by hand, and there are only a basic set of tools for that. However, running the solution and pulling results is a breeze. Because it is a p-element code, it is very forgiving in mesh size and shape - again, the opposite of nastran.

Usually, we pull farfield stresses from nastran and input them as loads into a detail stresscheck model to obtain raised stresses for fatigue analysis using unnotched S-N curves. Works pretty well.

Other notes - great tech support(!), and some bugginess with windows NT.

 

[Qshake]

It is based on the p-method finite element analysis and is very useful for handbook designs. These are for situations that are common occurances. It also does parametric design so that within handbooks or user created handbooks, user specified variables can changed and the program rerun within minutes of the original model development.

The program handles a variety of applications from those mentioned (stress concentrations) to laminates.

Having taken a course in FEA with one of the developers of that program I can state StressCheck was never intended to be the same as NASTRANS or others that build huge models and files. It was intended to be used with good judgement is creating smaller models that take advantage of symmetry and known boundary conditions.

So yes it does handle the smaller problems very well and not so well if you just have to have a billion dof model that panders to the ooh and aahs of the marketing department!



Regards,
Qshake

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