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Fatigue Analysis and Fracture Mechanics Simulation Services

Fatigue analysis and fracture mechanics are essential for ensuring the durability and safety of your designs. SimuTech Group provides advanced simulation solutions to identify potential failure points and improve reliability. Our expertise helps extend the lifespan of components, reduce warranty costs, and ensure your designs meet industry standards.

What is Fatigue?

Structural fatigue refers to the initiation and growth of cracks due to varying loads. These cracks can lead to failures even at stress levels that wouldn’t cause failure in a single load application. The damage from fatigue is cumulative, often irreparable, and usually undetectable, potentially leading to sudden catastrophic failures.

Fatigue cracks originate as surface dislocations in the material’s microstructure. Localized stress concentrations can form persistent slip bands, which can evolve into micro-sized Stage I shear cracks. Given enough energy, these micro-cracks can grow into Stage II tensile cracks, which are significantly larger than the material’s microstructure. These cracks disrupt the local stress field and if supplied with sufficient energy, Stage II cracks can propagate until a rapid tensile failure occurs.

fatigue analysis and performed by simutech group engineer at client site

Fatigue Analysis and Fracture Mechanics

Our FEA consulting engineers have hundreds of years of combined experience in fatigue analysis and fracture mechanics. We can help you predict the expected life of your designs, mean time to failure, and provide insight into whether existing cracks will propagate under continued service. Whether you are designing a new product or trying to understand field failures and reduce warranty costs, we can help. Our expertise includes:

  • High cycle fatigue (Stress Life S-N, and Strain Life e-N)
  • Low cycle fatigue (Strain Life e-N)
  • Thermo-mechanical fatigue
  • Simplified and complex duty cycle load histories
  • Weld fatigue
  • Vibratory fatigue (Stress Life S-N)
  • ASME pressure vessel fatigue
  • Damage accumulation for complex load histories
  • Prediction of crack initiation (Strain Life e-N)
  • Fracture Toughness Quantities: Stress Intensity Factors (SIFs) and/or Strain Energy Release Rate (J-Integral) prediction based on crack size and applied loading
  • Static or fatigue crack propagation (manual calculations, and/or use of ANSYS SMART Crack Growth) to predict cycles to failure (e.g. Paris Law)

Fatigue and Fracture Analysis Practical Applications

Nuclear Reactor System Head Crack Propagation

Performed fracture mechanics simulations to propagate crack in a reactor system flat header subject to thermal and pressure cycling.

Power Generation Support Bracket Fatigue Evaluation

Investigated low and high cycle fatigue on silencer baffle support bracket for thermal and operational loading.

Oil Sands Conveyor Link Life Investigation

Analyzed large conveyor chain link for comparative fatigue loading.

Aerospace V-Coupling Fatigue

Evaluation of circular V-coupling (clamp) for preload, cyclic pressure and startup/operating/shutdown thermal cycling.

Airplane Landing Gear

Determination of maintenance times for landing gear due to extension / retraction.

Transportation Industry Pantograph

High cycle fatigue analysis was conducted based on a load history generated from many linear load combinations.

Cantilevered Head X-Ray Machine Fatigue

A Goodman analysis was conducted on the fasteners and flanges where the cantilevered head attaches to the base of the machine. Multiple load histories were considered for high cycle fatigue.

Aerial Work Platform

Extensive weld fatigue evaluation, and lifecycle analysis.

BGA & LGA

Solder joint reliability analysis for electronics equipment.

simutech engineer performing fatigue analysis and fracture mechanics analysis at the client's site

 

 

Fatigue Failure Prevention via Correlation of Simulation to Testing

SimuTech Group has expertise in vibration, strain measurement, and many other physical testing applications. Some customers who come to us for fatigue analysis or life prediction of their components and systems don’t fully understand the loading and constraints that their hardware experiences in the field.

SimuTech Group’s test engineering team can instrument your hardware with accelerometers and/or strain gauges and measure the response to real world loading. The test data can then be correlated to FEA models. Our simulation consulting engineers work closely with our test engineers and often use these correlated FEA models to accurately predict fatigue life and damage accumulation under the customer’s correlated operating conditions.

We’re Here to Help

Our team of experienced engineers can assist you at any step of your process.