fe-safe
fe-safe is the powerful and easy-to-use fatigue post-processor for Finite Element Analysis (FEA), using proven techniques to accurately determine the fatigue life of metal components under complex cyclic loading.
Main Features
FAST
Highly efficient coding plus parallel and distributed processing allow fe-safe to analyse large FE models and report results quickly. Assemblies of different parts, surface finishes and materials can be analysed in a single run.
ACCURATE
Advanced multiaxial algorithms are the core of fe-safe. Unique nodal elimination methods ensure no trade-off between speed and accuracy. Users consistently report excellent correlation with test results.
EASY TO USE
fe-safe has many default settings and automatically selects the most appropriate algorithm based on the selected material. Standard analyses can be saved making it ideal for the non-specialist fatigue analyst, but fe-safe is also highly configurable for the advanced user.
fe-safe answers the following questions:
What is the fatigue life of this component?
fe-safe uses advanced critical plane multiaxial fatigue with in-built plasticity modelling to post-process results from an elastic FEA. Results can be displayed as contour plots showing crack locations and fatigue lives.
Will cracks propagate?
fe-safe uses critical distance methods to check whether cracks will propagate. Allowing cracks to initiate but not propagate to failure may allow higher working stresses and lighter and more efficient designs.
Where can material be saved? Where must extra material be added?
fe-safe calculates the allowable stresses or loads to achieve a specified service life. This is the factor of strength (FOS). fe-safe fully accounts for any changes in plasticity that may be caused by changes to loads or stresses. fe-safe shows how much the design is over-strength or under-strength at each node. Results are displayed as contour plots.
How reliable is this design?
The ‘warranty claim’ calculation combines variability in material strength and variability in loading to estimate the proportion of components un-cracked after any period of time in service. This can be used to achieve uniform reliability over different parts of an assembly. Factor of Strength (FOS) and Probability of Survival calculations can be combined with the initial fatigue life calculation in a single run. Together they show the interaction between design stress margins and component reliability.
Which loads are causing fatigue damage?
fe-safe performs a load sensitivity analysis to show the effect of each applied load. This can be used to refine the design and to design and validate an accelerated fatigue test. Once the critical and non-critical loads have been identified, test programmes can be optimised and validated by removing unrepresentative tests.
What is causing fatigue cracking?
fe-safe can provide detailed results for hot-spot areas or individual elements or nodes, time histories of calculated stresses and strains, fatigue cycle and damage histograms, Haigh and Smith plots and many other graphs to explain why the fatigue life is what it is.
fe-safe: The Fatigue Post-Processor for FEA
fe-safe combines FEA results for multiple loading conditions from FEA with the cyclic load history to predict the life of the component. The fe-safe suite of software directly interfacing to all major FEA suites (Abaqus, ANSYS, Nastran (MSC, NEi , NX), Pro/Mechanica) and its capabilities have been developed to meet the most demanding industry applications.
fe-safe includes a database of cyclic material property data, and permits users to add their own property data from fatigue tests. fe-safe reads structural analysis data from, and writes results to, FEA output database.
Benefits:
With fe-safe as an integrated part of your design process, you have the ability to:
- Optimise designs to use less material
- Reduce product recalls and warranty costs
- Optimise and validate design and test programmes
- Improve correlation between test and analysis within a single user interface
- Reduce prototype test times
- Speed up analysis times, thereby reducing man-time hours
- Increase confidence that your product designs pass their test schedules as “right first time”
*fe-safe is not within the scope of the ISO Certification.
