Finite element analysis (FEA) software from Ansys provides engineers the ability to automate and customize simulations and even parameterize them for many design scenarios.
You can easily connect Ansys Structural Mechanics software to other physics tools for even better realism, predicting performance and behavior of even the most complex projects. Engineers throughout the industry optimize product designs with FEA software from Ansys.
FEA Applications
Strength Analysis
Understanding component strength is needed to determine a product’s lifecycle, performance, and failure modes. Several factors dictate strength requirements for design and materials: thermal stress, pressure conditions, bolt tension, mechanical loading, and rotational acceleration.
Composite Materials
Composite materials are versatile, strong, and light, making them suitable for manufacturing many types of products. Carbon fiber, for example, is often used in aerospace and automotive projects, and is now used more often in applications such as musical instruments and bicycle frames. The properties of composites, however, make simulating a challenge.
Impact
The Ansys structural mechanics software suite models impact between two or more bodies, including explicit dynamics, mechanical, and rigid body dynamics, allowing you to determine damage and deformation. Solve high-speed interactions and complex contact with Explicit Dynamics and use RBD for no deformation or irrelevant deformation.
Vibration Analysis
Ansys Mechanical simulations help you understand how your designs will respond to vibrations from phenomena such as brake squeal, earthquakes, transport, and acoustic and harmonic loads. Ansys Mechanical gives you a platform for single physic and multiphysics simulations to help you overcome your toughest vibration challenges.
Optimization
To begin an analysis, engineers first simulate performance of a base design. The model can then be re-used to examine different loading, design parameters, variations in environmental conditions, and changes in manufacturing. You can perform all types of simulation in one environment with Ansys DesignXplorer and determine the best design for all conditions.
HPC
Solving structural mechanics models with a high level of detail requires long solve times on a single CPU core (i.e. those with a mesh size over 500k DOF). Single-core CPUs don’t access sufficient computer memory for larger models (more than 10 MDOF). Choose parallel processing with Ansys HPC and significantly reduce your solution time.
Thermal Analysis
As the envelope continues to be pushed further by the drive for lighter, more efficient, and smaller designs, heat and thermal management become more critical. Engineers need more tools for accurate simulation for thermal models that include not just radiation, convection, and conduction loads, but also effects of power losses and thermal energy pipe flows and friction.
Topology Optimization
The optimal shape of a part is often organic and counterintuitive; Ansys topology optimization technology lets you specify where supports and loads are located on a volume of material and lets the software find the best shape. You can now easily perform light weighting of structures, extract CAD shapes and quickly verify the optimized design.
Additive Manufacturing
Additive manufacturing is a method of fabricating complex parts layer-by-layer from a 3-D model. Ansys additive manufacturing simulations help you optimize your design for 3-D printing, determine any potential stresses or distortions in the design so they can be corrected upfront, and predict the microstructure of the part based on the thermal history during fabrication.
Durability
To reduce the costs of warranties and improve reliability, engineers need to design durable products. Using Ansys FEA software for fatigue analysis, you can avoid unexpected failures and warranty expenses by learning how designs behave across time and increased load cycles.
Rigid Body Dynamics
Simulating system motion by assuming flexible parts and performing customary finite elements analysis is expensive computationally. The Ansys Rigid Body Dynamics add-on module offers a more efficient and fast solution via robust yet affordable rigid multibody dynamics analysis.
Hydrodynamics
Offshore structures often have specific design requirements. When simulation of effects and loading on structural response is a design requirement, use Ansys software to reproduce load conditions and responses for projects, from high-fidelity simulations with all fluid loading environment aspects to simple models for truss-type structures.