Editor’s Pick: Analyze Fatigue in Composite Materials

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

My friend Dave was an old guy when I was young. He was a retired English prof with a bad heart. Should anyone lend him an ear, Dave would reel off a poem or a quote he had memorized. “Fatigue makes cowards of us all,” he said as he lay dying, quoting non-poet Vince Lombardi. Thought of that quote when I came across a new product announcement on fe-safe/Composites from Safe Technology recently. This one sounds really interesting.

The premise of fe-safe/Composites is that composites have issues that require a fundamentally different approach to fatigue analysis than do metals—things like microcracks and diffused damage, frequency, and load histories. Take load conditions. Even simple load conditions cause complex behaviors in the constituents making up your composite. And frequency and load history complicate the physics even further as well as introduce a whole new section of the physics theory canon into your investigation. In short the complexities of, and computational load inherent in, composite analysis has made tools for predicting the fatigue life of composites rare commodities.

Safe Technology believes that its new fe-safe/Composites,  developed with Firehole Composites, is up to the challenge of predicting the fatigue life of composite structures in a computationally efficient as well as robust manner. It works on the constituent level as well as the lamina level at every integration point in an FE model. It does not require exotic material data, it interfaces with what seems to be all the major FEA powerhouses, and it accepts all sorts of component loading file formats.

I doubt that predicting the fatigue life has made you a coward, but it may very well have left you frustrated. fe-safe/Composites sounds as if it is dragging composites into the mainstream analysis world, which could dispense with a lot of your frustration. That’s why I recommend that you learn about it from today’s Pick of the Week write-up.

Lombardi also once said, “Some of us will do our jobs well and some will not, but we will be judged by only one thing: the result.”  fe-safe/Composites might be the tool that you need to both do your job well and to get the results judged well by others.

Thanks, pal.—Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Read today’s Pick of the Week write-up.

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