Making informed product design decisions to improve your product's durability is increasingly important in today’s highly competitive economic climate. Organizations are under pressure to reduce cost, decrease time to market and improve sustainability as well as push for longer product life. Product failure can result in recalls, high repair costs, legal liabilities and damage to a product brand. To be successful you need to reach the right balance in your product design. Designs that are too conservative are costly to manufacture and may not be competitive, while less conservative product designs may fail while in use.

 Fatigue, a major source of product failure, can sometimes result in significant damage and injuries. When exposed to repeated cyclic loadings most products will eventually fail. Fatigue is caused by repeated or otherwise varying loads and only occurs from exposure to repetitive stress over time as microscopic changes become cracks that causes the malfunction. Breakdown of any product or part, even when not catastrophic, can result in hefty expenses. Optimizing the shape, size and materials employed by using simulation is the most cost-effective way to arrive at the desired product life.

To complement the FEA and CFD simulation software from ANSYS, Inc, SimuTech Group 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, fewer warranty and recall costs and all in less time. Traditional methods of over-engineering components, and expensive open-ended test-redesign-test programmes, are not meeting the needs of the modern engineering company.

For welded joints and welded structures, the prediction of failure locations and the calculation of fatigue lives are notoriously complex and difficult tasks that can often result in poor correlation with test data. The Verity® mesh-insensitive structural stress method (SSM) has been developed and patented by Battelle. It is recognized as a major breakthrough in the fatigue analysis of welded joints for Finite Element models.