To answer these issues, and many more, Siemens has created Femap, their standalone FEA tool for pre / post processing.
Limited Access
FEA users often face limited support when dealing with CAD drawings supplied by their customers or design team, mainly because these CAD drawings can be associated with any number of programs and/or data types. An FEA framework independent of CAD program, version, or data type, however, can save the time and money associated with recreating a design within the FEA domain.
To that end, Femap’s CAD independence is really helpful. It supports all CAD data types and systems, even in a multi-CAD environment.
Franco Belloni, Co-founder of NOESIM, notes that “[NOESIM] needed a CAE tool that could interface with all the different CAD packages used by our customers. It was an easy decision, we could acquire Femap, a Windows-native tool that has multi-CAD integration.”
Limited Geometry Cleanup
CAD designs regularly include little fillets, holes, slivers, and edges that can wreak havoc on your mesh. Without cleaning the geometry up, meshes easily become too big to accurately analyze.
That’s one reason why your FEA software provides the tools necessary to manually and/or automatically remove these details without risking oversimplification. The changes must be reported (if changed automatically), or flagged for future fixes to be transparent. Femap’s automatic and interactive meshing toolbox can perform both of these functions, accurately combining or eliminating surfaces, curves, and slivers without endangering the final results.
Limited Geometry Idealization
Depending on the solver needed to analyze your system (such as with dynamic response or non-linear systems), the size of your object can make your analysis impossible or impractical. In such cases, it is important that you be able to shrink your FE model without degrading its accuracy.
Femap’s Mid-plane extraction has the ability to replace thin walls with shells or frames with beams, reducing the size of the final FE model. This allows a user to focus on the areas of the model with suspected stress, such as holes, sockets, or joints.
Timo de Beer, Principal Structural Engineer at GustoMSC, notes that “other products focus on automatic meshing of complex mechanical components, which Femap can do, but if you tried to do that with something as big as a [offshore drilling vessels’] hull, your model would be composed of solid elements, which would be much too large. Modeling with beams and plates is a better approach, and something that Femap strongly supports.”
Conclusion
To see what other problems Femap has solved, or to learn more about their CAD independent capabilities, please see our series of Siemens webinars.
Image source: Siemens