Engineering Tools Newsletter #1

Structural assemblies often have many modes of vibration that are difficult to understand. If the system does not meet its dynamics requirements for frequency or strength, understanding the causes of the vibration is critical to your ability to modify the structure successfully. This tool uses energy methods to help identity what parts of the structure are interacting at each natural frequency and gives you the tools to correct your design.

If your finite element model is missing good group organization, navigating the model can be difficult to impossible. This tool automatically builds Femap groups that contain parts of the model which are individually connected to each other by common fastened methods such as springs or rigids. You often want to separate meshes into their structural components, such as motor/stator or individual brackets that may all have the same material and property type. This tool will automatically organize your model even if it started without any groups or layers. It is an essential tool for people using legacy models which were supplied in bulk deck format only.

Cbush spring elements are used everywhere, especially, to represent fasteners in a design. This tool reports all the selected elements across output sets into a summary of the results and automatically processes tension and shear combinations necessary for computing fastener strength margins.

Solving Nastran jobs outside of the Femap GUI is a skill you should have. This tool provides a simple way to solve as many Nastran input decks as you have in a separate command window. You can solve in series or in parallel to take advantage of your licenses and maximize your computational power to solve the jobs in the fastest way. When you get to a point in the project when you need to solve 100’s or 1000’s of cases, this is the best way to do it.