Blog Posts

One of the most common questions you’ll hear asked in the FEA community is “What mesh size should I use?”, and for good reason! If your mesh is too coarse, the answers that you generate may not be as accurate as you need them to be. Conversely, if your mesh is too fine, the simulation

Mechanical engineers in their studies will learn how to do mechanical analysis on basic shapes, such as beams. However, real life parts are almost never that simple. The shapes are complex and they can be loaded or constrained in various ways. So how can we analyze these parts? The answer is through finite element analysis!

If you’ve been in the field of engineering for even a short time, you’ve undoubtedly heard the term ‘fatigue’. But have you ever thought about what it actually is, why it matters and how we can go about predicting it? If not, this post is for you! And hey, it might be a good refresher

Fidelis Industry Insights is a series of blog posts aimed at pinpointing and highlighting where Fidelis, and the industry-leading SIMULIA software we provide, can revolutionize the way our customers and partners think about engineering and business in general. In the first installment, we take a look at the Aerospace Custom Tooling industry and learn how

Plane stress and plane strain assumptions are something that we hear all the time in FEA, and in solid mechanics in general, but what actually are they? It is often assumed that everyone in the field of engineering implicitly understands what these terms mean, hence straightforward explanations can be somewhat hard to find. Here, we

Whether you’re venturing into FEA for the first time or you’re a seasoned analyst, it is important to have a good picture in your mind – and maybe even a written plan – for your model before you ever even open the pre-processing software. If you try to skip this step, you’ll likely be heading

We regularly need to model contact between parts within FEA models. After all, not many of our simulations will include only one component, and as we begin to increase the complexity of our jobs, we tend to prefer contact over traditional ties and glue. On occasion, it is simply not possible to obtain static equilibrium

When running a finite element analysis, one of the first decisions we must make is whether we think it should be considered a static or dynamic problem. But what exactly constitutes a static and a dynamic problem? And which analysis type is most suitable for each? In this post, we aim to break down these

Many of us are familiar with the terms first- and second-order as it relates to finite elements, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we all know how and when to use them. Today, we will be discussing a few key points regarding element order and making a case for why it matters to us as CAE

FEA models come in all shapes and sizes. While sometimes we’re trying to find the stresses in a stiff, steel structure, others we might be looking at the behavior of a thin membrane or the buckling of a slender column. You may have heard the term ‘nonlinear geometry’ before, but perhaps are not really sure