What information related to FEA do you feel is lacking out there?

[Donnelly]

In general, I think that FEA can be a great tool to help people design. Have I seen irresponsible usage of the tool? Absolutely! I think training/awareness/responsibility isn't discussed enough in the FEA conversation when people bring it onboard. People respond routinely in forums when people have questions around FEA, "Find an analyst who knows what they are doing and let them do it." How then do we move the needle as an engineering community? How do we distinguish our work for our company and/or grow as engineers? The way I like to look at my contribution is to help those that know little, to develop them from small projects with simple physics and low liabilties progress to being able to large projects. It doesn't happen overnight, or even over a year. It's a long-term commitment.

I constantly hear on forums, don't get FEA training from a software reseller, they only teach you the software. I've been working for a software reseller for the past 3 years, in that time I have trained many people on FEA usage. I have developed material to present outside of the software, about FEA in general, that has stemmed from individual questions in the classes. Overall, It's starting to get to be too much material to cover along with the software. I'm here to understand what it is most people are uncomfortable with (for now I only know what our customers are uncomfortable with), and create a format/outlet that I can share knowledge with people about FEA issues. To start with, I'd like to ask engineers (like you) from all industries, what it is you're uncomfortable with. Let's try to limit it to your top 5 problems when performing an analysis.

Example categories of problems:

Interpreting results
Selecting Boundary conditions
Correlating results with an experiment
Uncertainty analysis
Modeling for the analysis
Material Properties/Material Models
Limitations

Anything else you can think of. The more specific you can be, the better content I can create. As I said, I'm thinking about a format that I can best use to teach people how to use FEA. Some possibilities would be a combination of the following:

Blog - Discussion of important/general topics
Videos - showing the setup of analysis from start to end, without editing out problems along the way
Short Guides - Focused on very specific types of analysis
Office hours - time set aside to provide FEA guidance

This would all be done on my own time, outside of my work hours. If you're willing to share with me what you are troubled with in FEA here in this post, then I'm willing to spend some time to help you out.

 

[SWComposites]

How to idealize a real structure with a FEM - when to use beams, plates/shells, solids - and when not to use them; why tet meshing everything is a bad idea
Why rigid elements must be used with EXTREME care - better yet never used.
How to model bolted joints properly, and how to interpret the results.
What material properties to use for each element type, linear and non-linear.
How to properly do mesh convergence studies, why they are needed, and what are the appropriate results to use at peak stresses - element, nodal, averaged, etc - and why ALL of them are just APPROXIMATIONS.

 

[corus]

What I've found most lacking in those doing FEA is commonsense, but how you teach that would be difficult. The other aspect apparently lacking is that FEA is an approximate numerical method. Engineers don't seem to grasp the mathematics involved and sometimes mathematicians don't grasp the engineering involved.

 

[Donnelly]

Thanks guys. This is a great start and mirrors what I've already found other students asking about.

@SWComposites
Thanks for all the ideas. There is a lot there to get me started. I will be in touch as some of this content starts to be produced.

@Corus
That mimics exactly the problem I have faced in training. I've included material of my own in courses that try to balance this a little bit, but for some people that are too far one way or the other it's very difficult. I'm still working to improve this though.

I will start creating content from both of your thoughts. I'll let you know when something is produced and where it is posted so that you can read/review it.

Thank you,
Brandon Donnelly