I wanted to show you something about FEA that I think is just great. The whole idea of FEA or FEM is awesome, any engineer that has used a good program and gotten good results would probably agree with me.
Well SolidWorks has this new FEA and analysis addon that I have been poking around with. Check out this picture.
This is the suspension chocolate block that I was talking about a few posts ago. I actually did this a while ago with the intension of posting here. So as you can see there is a factor of safety of 2 for the piece in the way that I had loaded it. The actual loading would not be in this direction, but I generally check all cases and this one was interesting. I then decided to weld a end cap on the two ends there to help with the factor of safety, and look what I got.
The factor of safety is now 1.8 for this piece. I would have not guessed that it would lower with more support. Because I was able to analyze this before actually building it, I was able to avoid the posibility of lowering the strength of my suspension.So I hope you can see why I am a huge fan of FEA/FEM and general order of magnitude. I think Jersey Tom talked about being a fan of ROM (Rough Order of Magnitude) in one of his last posts. Well Jersey Tom, I totally agree with you.
Now that's about all I have, just wanted to share something cool with those readers out there.
I'll see ya when I see ya.
