To complement the FEA and CFD simulation software from ANSYS, Inc, SimuTech Group also provides sales, support, training and consulting services for fe-safe™ by Safe Technology..

fe-safe is a highly effective tool for fatigue analysis of FEA models.

• Used by leading companies in automotive, heavy truck, off-highway, marine, defense, offshore, power generation, wind energy, medical engineering and many other industries.
• Developed continuously since the early 1990’s in collaboration with industry to ensure that it continues to set the benchmark for fatigue analysis software.
• Was the first commercially available fatigue analysis software to focus on modern multiaxial strain based fatigue methods.
• Provides unique capabilities for thermomechanical fatigue and creep-fatigue, the fatigue analysis of composite materials and the Verity® Structural Stress method for welded joints.
• Renowned for its accuracy, speed, comprehensive capabilities and ease of use.

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.

Modern technologies are available to meet these tough demands.

Many companies use advanced Finite Element Analysis (FEA) like ANSYS to calculate design stresses, but the fatigue analysis is often still done by manually picking stress points for spread-sheet analysis. This is time consuming and unreliable because it’s easy to miss failure locations.

Component validation by fatigue testing a prototype design in the test lab is time-consuming. If the prototype fails prematurely, a costly, open-ended cycle of design-test-redesign may be required. Project time-scales slip and delivery is late.

Key Benefits of fe-safe:

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

• optimise designs to use less material
• reduce product recalls and warranty costs
• optimise and validate design and test programmes
• 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 your product designs pass their test schedules as “right first time”

Key Features of fe-safe:

• Calculates fatigue lives at every point on a model, producing contour plots to reveal fatigue lives and crack sites. Critical locations will not be missed
• Determines how much the stresses must be changed in order to achieve a target design life, showing clearly where the component is under strength or where material and weight can be saved
• Estimates warranty claim curves based on probabilities of failure
• Identifies which parts of a duty cycle are most damaging. In prototype testing this could mean shorter
• tests with fewer actuators
• Manufacturing effects such as residual stresses from a stamped or formed part, or the material variation effects in castings and forgings can be included
• Automatic detection of contact, with contact fatigue algorithms
• No special meshing is required. fe-safe works from a standard free tet mesh. Solid and shell elements
• can be combined on the same model
• Unique calculation of the fatigue life of welded joints using the Verity® Structural Stress method
• Unique calculation of composite materials using the physics based Multi-Continuum Technology (MCT) methods available in fe-safe/Composites™

Regardless of the complexity of your fatigue analysis, fe-safe fits smoothly into your design process, enabling you to develop products that are designed for durability.

With fe-safe as an integrated part of your design process, you have the ability to optimise designs and test programs, reduce prototype test times product recalls and warranty costs - all with increased confidence that your product designs pass their test schedules as “right first time”.

To see how fe-safe and ANSYS Workbench work together:

Getting Out All the Breaks
Pratt & Miller get ahead of the race by redesigning a brake pedal using ANSYS with fe-safe fatigue analysis software.

For more information, please contact us or visit the fe-safe™ website.