Jim Lipsey

Vince Adams asks “Should Analysis Be Left to the Specialists?”, and decides that designers shouldn’t be afraid perform Finite Element Analysis (FEA) in their development efforts. People who specialize in FEA tend to take the opposite position (see this discussion) - that FEA is a specialized science that impacts product safety and should be left to the experts. Generally, I think Vince makes a strong case, but one thing troubles me in his argument:

What is the real danger of a less knowledgeable user doing their own FEA? … [The] only real danger, in nearly all companies who don’t employ analysis specialists, is lost time in the process as work is spent doing analysis that might not yield any useful information.

The problem isn’t that the information might not be useful.  Rather, the information can be completely wrong.  COSMOSWorks is a terrific package.  It makes FEA very easy, and seemingly for that reason alone, is sometimes dismissed by FEA superanalysts.  They couldn’t be more mistaken.  A quality analysis no longer requires hours or days of tweaking meshes and entering constraints through an incredibly unintuitive interface.   This barrier to entry alone has helped many sub-par FEA jockies maintain a cushy existance.  But the fundamental rule of FEA is that the results are only as good as the model.  COSMOSWorks will help you set up and run an analysis in minutes, but if things aren’t set up intelligently, it will much prefer to generate results that are far removed from reality than provide no answers at all.  The problem is compounded by its beautiful outcome renderings that make whatever result is being displayed seem definitively correct.

FEA requires a basic understanding of all the components of good analysis, including geometry simplification, proper meshing, application of restraints and loads, mesh convergence and data interpretation.  This doesn’t mean FEA should be left to the experts, but companies who incorporate it into their designers’ functions should make sure they have the basic skills to do a proper job and enough sense to know when to call in the experts.  SolidWorks’ two day Intro to COSMOSWorks course does a pretty good job at this.