WHAT THE HECK IS AN FEA?
OK, so a lot
of you have heard me talk about doing an “FEA” on your design to optimize
it. We normally explain what we are going to do when performing an FEA
but I thought it might be helpful to give a little more of an explanation.
First of all, I should mention that most of us here at Blue Dolphin are engineers. Now you don’t have to be an engineer to develop a product, but there are definitely times when having that kind of ability at your disposal is incredibly valuable and sometimes it is even required. We like to approach the solution to your research and development project and product innovations not only from the prospective of our 150 years combined experience but also from an engineering viewpoint.
Finite Element Analysis or FEA is one of the tools we use as engineers to arrive at answers. A simple explanation of FEA is that it breaks the problem we are trying to solve into very small bits and calculates the interaction of all of these bits to each other. In school, engineers learn to solve FEA by doing hand calculations – a veeery long and tedious process. Fortunately there are very sophisticated (and expensive) softwares out there that help us solve these calculations and even give us graphical results. That’s the good part.
The bad part is that, as the saying goes, “Garbage in = garbage out!”. It is important to recognize that understanding how the parameters are entered can drastically affect the answer and that verifying the results with a few hand calculations can be invaluable.
I’ll give you an example of the importance of this. A few years back Shell Oil gave us a problem to solve. It involved a pressurized natural gas tank. They were given the results of an analysis that didn’t make sense to them. After we reviewed the results we agreed and set out to perform our own FEA. The following is a graphical output of the results:
First of all, I should mention that most of us here at Blue Dolphin are engineers. Now you don’t have to be an engineer to develop a product, but there are definitely times when having that kind of ability at your disposal is incredibly valuable and sometimes it is even required. We like to approach the solution to your research and development project and product innovations not only from the prospective of our 150 years combined experience but also from an engineering viewpoint.
Finite Element Analysis or FEA is one of the tools we use as engineers to arrive at answers. A simple explanation of FEA is that it breaks the problem we are trying to solve into very small bits and calculates the interaction of all of these bits to each other. In school, engineers learn to solve FEA by doing hand calculations – a veeery long and tedious process. Fortunately there are very sophisticated (and expensive) softwares out there that help us solve these calculations and even give us graphical results. That’s the good part.
The bad part is that, as the saying goes, “Garbage in = garbage out!”. It is important to recognize that understanding how the parameters are entered can drastically affect the answer and that verifying the results with a few hand calculations can be invaluable.
I’ll give you an example of the importance of this. A few years back Shell Oil gave us a problem to solve. It involved a pressurized natural gas tank. They were given the results of an analysis that didn’t make sense to them. After we reviewed the results we agreed and set out to perform our own FEA. The following is a graphical output of the results:
It was
apparent to us that some of the parameters used in the original analysis were
in error and, therefore, gave erroneous results. Our analysis allowed Shell to proceed with a successful design.
Blue Dolphin
Design and Engineering’s FEA capability includes:
Thermal
Fluid Analysis Nonlinear
Analysis Linear Stress Analysis Structural Optimization Structural Optimization Motion Analysis Fatigue Analysis Vibration Analysis Thermal Analysis Structural Analysis
Performing
these types of Analysis allows Blue Dolphin to optimize your design on the
computer and reduce the amount of evaluation required using prototypes.
If you would
like more information on what FEA is or how you might benefit from it give us a
call.
Mark A. Jackson P.E.
President
Blue Dolphin Design and Engineering, Inc.
559-222-4111
President
Blue Dolphin Design and Engineering, Inc.
559-222-4111
