r/fea

I've been working on matworld.ai — the idea is to make it fast to find a material, see where the data came from and what its limitations are, and export a material card that drops into your solver of choice.

I know this sub has seen a lot of "materials database" attempts and most of them disappoint for predictable reasons (shallow data, no provenance, unit chaos, no temperature dependence, abandoned in 18 months). I'd rather hear what's wrong with it now than ship into the void.

Specific things I'd value feedback on:

1. Is the data actually deep enough to be useful, or is it MatWeb-with-a-new-coat-of-paint?

2. Does the material card export hit the format you'd actually paste into your input deck?

3. What's missing that would make you bookmark this vs. close the tab?

My company has 2 FEA openings for Engineers with experience 1 to 6 years. It is an India based Engineering consulting firm . Dm for more details

I am trying to do a multiphysics model of soft material. Fin like flapping propulsors. The fluids and dynamics part I have done but solid mechanics I am weak in. I do not plan to do FEA since it’s too computationally intensive alongside CFD. I plan to idealize it using beam theory. I do not think undergrad mech beam theory leaned in solid mechanics is enough? Can I get book recommendations on what I need to know? Preferably one book that is perfect fit….

Hello people,

I am stuck in a very worst condition in terms of my project, I was required to compute and interpreter a model in LS-DYNA but I am unable to do so as the interface of the software is so much difficult for me to understand, I don't have much time left for the submission and I am not understanding how to help myself. Please can someone guide me with it?

Currently I am working on crack propagation of NSCB model through Mohr coulomb. I have experimental data available with me, I just need to verify it by numerical analysis for which I am required to deal with this particular software.

I need to quickly estimate stresses in a structure under both linear and angular loads. The loads would be linear accelerations in three directions, angular velocities in three directions, and angular accelerations in three directions.

I am trying to take a small dataset of FEA runs and use superposition to estimate stresses in the structure. I can do this with the linear accelerations accurately (5-10% error).

For example if I have stresses in the structure for 1g in x (sigmaX), 1g in y (sigmaY), and 1g in z (sigmaZ) then stresses from 2g in x, 4g in y, 6g in z will be approximately the 2sigmaX+4sigmaY+6sigmaZ.

I have tried to use this same principle for angular loads unsuccessfully since the loads are not linear. Using superposition for angular accelerations can sometimes produce reasonable accuracy, but it is heavily dependent on where the stress is and not accurate for the entire structure. Superposition with angular velocities is so inaccurate it’s useless.

I recognize that the core issue is that I am trying to use linear methods to approximate a nonlinear angular load, and that the “best” way to do this with the highest accuracy is to just run an FEA case with the specific loading, but this is not feasible as I don’t need a high degree of accuracy but rather a reasonable approximation that is automated for thousands of load cases and very quick (<<1s) to calculate, so running FEA on a case-by-case basis is impossible.

Is there some way to quickly get an estimate of stresses for a given load provided that stresses for “unit” loads are known? The best approach I could come up with for angular loads was to just take the linear acceleration that the angular load (angular velocity and angular acceleration) is applying for a given point and then calculate the stress at that point by applying a stress delta from angular loads based on unit linear loads.

Using the example from earlier the stress would be 2sigmaX+4sigmaY+6sigmaZ+delta.

I think this approach will reasonably approximate the stresses as long as angular accelerations and angular velocities are small, but would appreciate any suggestions for a more accurate approach if there’s any methods I’m unaware of.

And I’m scaling principal stresses with superposition in case it wasn’t clear.

Hey r/fea,

I've been building an automated FEA pipeline for hardware founders who don't have simulation expertise.

Here's what it does:

- Takes a STEP file as input

- Auto-meshes with Gmsh (tetrahedral, quality-optimized)

- Solves linear elasticity with FEniCSx

- Returns von Mises stress, safety factor, and a plain English

interpretation

Stack: Python, Gmsh, FEniCSx, Groq API

Runtime: ~4 seconds on a simple bracket

Currently looking for hardware engineers or founders with real STEP files to test this on. Free beta — I just want feedback on where it breaks.

Trying it to make a complete agentic structural engineer.

Happy to answer technical questions about the pipeline.

What failure modes do you think I'll hit on real industrial geometry?

Here's the demo video. Please reach out to me!

Demo video

Hey everyone,

I still see so many of us manually calculating true stress and strain in Excel, dragging formulas down 16,000 rows, and trying to manually snip out the descending plastic points after necking just so the solver doesn't throw a convergence error.

It’s a massive waste of time and leaves too much room for copy-paste errors.

Abaqus actually has a Calibration tool that handles all of this automatically, but it feels like nobody uses it.

Here is the faster workflow:

1. Go to Model -> Calibration -> Create
2. Paste your raw engineering data (Data Set).
3. Right-click the data set -> Process -> Convert. (This automatically switches nominal to true form).
4. Create a Behavior (Elastoplastic Isotropic) and map your data directly to your material.

The best part is you can easily pinpoint the yield point and calculate the ultimate tensile strength right in the UI.

-Abaqus still requires your plastic stress data to be in ascending order. You still need to manually delete the decreasing values after necking, otherwise your simulation will fail.

I actually just re-edited and uploaded a quick visual walkthrough of this exact process on my channel if you want to see the step-by-step UI clicks:http://www.youtube.com/@FEAMASTER?sub\_confirmation=1

https://preview.redd.it/euruwuhkbzxg1.png?width=2750&format=png&auto=webp&s=21d8f8d3daf49e607b27bd1c4b79513259b574e4

Hello guys, I hope you're all doing great!
I'm a final year mechanical engineering student, and I'm really interested in numerical modeling of materials especially polycristals, and their constitutive laws (Plasticity, Damage, Fracture...)
When reading this article Identification of crystal plasticity parameters for a non-irradiated and irradiated A508 bainite steel I came across this solver called Z-set and apparently it's a famous tool among french researchers, I got the free trial, but it's so hard to use with that wierd documentation, so I think I'll just drop it lol...
Is Z‑set really as powerful as its reputation suggests? Do you need to know C++ to use it properly? Is it one of those tools that's painful at first but totally worth it in the long run, especially if you're aiming for a PhD in mechanics/materials?

Hello! I am pretty new to comsol and i was wondering how would you aproach the following problem. You have an assembly of parts that are in contact and that you have to simulate stress for. I can't make a single body of the whole assembly. What type of connectors would you use for the screw holes in the model(they are 100+) i tried with rigid connectors but the simulation keeps failing. Frankly i dont care about the force put on the screws i just dont want the plates to be glued togheder. Also i dont have the actual screws modeled to use bolt pretension. Thank you a lot!

Hi, I'm working on a project in my internship where I have a channel that is currently not producible with additive manufacturing. It's a channel that has multiple 90-degree angles and a decreasing diameter (it's a rectangular cross-section). I've done CFD with nTop to find the exit pressure. So I now have an inlet pressure (200 bar) and an outlet pressure (50 bar).

Would it be possible to somehow create a generatively designed channel that decreases the pressure by the same amount, based on the starting pressure values?

I'm trying to model a latch part which is shaped like a hook. The hook piece looks like a rod with a hook on the bottom that hooks around a pin, and is being pulled up on from the top. The hook curvature may not match the pin's exactly. I'm not sure how best to model the hook/pin interaction in FEA to make sure the hook is strong enough. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Right now I'm fixing the bottom part of the hook and pulling on the top, but this feels like an improper way to do it.

https://preview.redd.it/hqi8zmzzozwg1.png?width=524&format=png&auto=webp&s=ee7c808e55e1104f7388b06a3e1d369a85f07e30

Im trying to simulate a bead weld on Ansys transient thermal, and I’m trying to verify my results against a published paper.

I’ve inputted the exact same geometry , mesh, heat input, material, conductivity ,radiance from the paper and have also added temperature dependent thermal properties for the same materials that they use.

I used commands to write a script for my moving heat source with a goldak double ellipsoid formula (same formula and constant values as the paper).

Despite all of this, my maximum temperature is around 7000 K, as opposed to the paper’s max of 1700K. I’m lost as to what the issue is. I’ve already crosschecked the units, and I thiink the BFDELE command for heat sources is in order, but I can put it in the comments if you’d like to see.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions you might have!

Hello, I am currently working on my thesis which includes strucutral analysis of wing rib and optimization. I have already performed CFD simulation of airfoil to obatin lift and drag coefficient's.

My models consist two shell ribs, Nose and Rear rib, conected via MPC to mimic assembly conection with rivets.

My question is how should I apply lift and drag forces? I have considered applying them at the aerodynamic center (x/c=25) scoped to the wing flanges, to mimic real world sitation when skin transfers loads to the rib throught flanges. A,B and C are supports.

https://preview.redd.it/kkouolch4rwg1.png?width=550&format=png&auto=webp&s=7444d938e25e95043739a2f4fe7c9f6b0ee8f1e9

https://preview.redd.it/rp186b1y3rwg1.png?width=1072&format=png&auto=webp&s=04e561ac90b0484150fcc89885506a2692806481

https://preview.redd.it/ihhuws9v3rwg1.png?width=318&format=png&auto=webp&s=1bf6ffb83eca8928bb97b66a4fc1f53dfe15b387

I have a steel beam with a concrete plate above it. The connection shall be ideal and the steel part is modeled as shells and the concrete as solid. To combine both, i used a tie constraint . To take account of the thickness of the shell, I defined the reference line at the top of the shell and placed the concrete plate directly on it. I expected the stresses ( material is equal for testing) on the top of the shell to be equal to the stresses at the bottom of the concrete but it is not. Where am I wrong and what is the correct way to model this situation?

I have some free time over the summer and looking to do some fem projects with python/Matlab. I'm mainly looking to import a mesh, (coordinate, connectivity) and writing my own solver.

I took a fem class this semester, and I know how to solve time dependent problems, and vector pdes. We didn't cover non-linear problems though and mainly used Lagrange polynomials as our basis functions.

Should I explore how meshing is done, and a non Lagrange basis? I think I'm primarily interested in thermal and fluid problems.

I wanted to do a project on heat conduction in flexible membrane. Just wanted to know if its possilbe on abaqus as I cant find the right element for that.

The membrane family of elements dont have M3D4T which apparently claude and gemini were saying

Thanks