Overview

Industry is putting increasing pressure on manufacturers to use less material to deliver lightweight but stronger components, lower warranty and recall costs and all in less time. Many companies use advanced finite element analysis to calculate design stresses, but the fatigue analysis is often still done by manually picking stress points for spreadsheet analysis. This is time-consuming and unreliable because it is easy to miss failure locations.

The fe-safe suite of software is world-leading technology for durability analysis from FEA, 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 was the first commercially available fatigue analysis software to focus on modern multiaxial strain-based fatigue methods and it continues to set the benchmark for fatigue analysis software.

Key Capabilities

fe-safe is a powerful, comprehensive and easy-to-use suite of fatigue analysis software for finite element models. It is used alongside commercial FEA software, to calculate:

• Where fatigue cracks will occur
• When fatigue cracks will initiate
• The factors of safety on working stresses (for rapid optimisation)
• The probability of survival at different service lives (the ‘warranty claim’ curve)
• Whether cracks will propagate

Benefits

With the fe-safe product suite as an integrated part of your design process, you have the ability to:

• Increase the fatigue life of safety critical components
• Optimize designs to use less material
• Reduce product recalls and warranty costs
• Optimize and validate design and test programs
• 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 product designs pass physical test schedules as “right-first-time”
• Reduce reliance on physical testing

What’s New?

General Enhancements 2021

• uUnified structural/fatigue licensing – 3DXEXPERIENCE & fe-safe
• wIncludes core-count-dependent token & credit licensing – same as for Abaqus
• uANSYS RST support updated, including support for ANSYS WorkBench Named Selections
• uSusmel-Lazzarin Infinite Life Method – previously only available for TCD
• uSurface Finish Definition/Property files – new .sfprop
• uPhone-home anti-cracking prevention

General Enhancements 2022

• uDurability execution on cloud/grid – 22xGA/FD01
• wPreviously durability had to be solved locally
• uCompressive mean stress corrections for Verity line welds – 22xFD01
• uSpot Weld fatigue theory enhanced for complex loading
• uCorrections to the calculations for several algorithms, including Brown-Miller – 22xFD01
• uQt upgrade – 22x GA