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 structural integrity. Our expertise helps extend the lifespan of components, optimize performance, and ensure your designs meet industry standards.
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.
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:
Performed fracture mechanics simulations to propagate crack in a reactor system flat header subject to thermal and pressure cycling.
Investigated low and high cycle fatigue on silencer baffle support bracket for thermal and operational loading.
Analyzed large conveyor chain link for comparative fatigue loading.
Evaluation of circular V-coupling (clamp) for preload, pressure and thermal loading.
Determination of maintenance times for landing gear due to extension / retraction.
Spalling and pitting (gears and bearings) are surface fatigue phenomena.
Fatigue analysis to determine early life failure.
Extensive weld fatigue evaluation, and lifecycle analysis.
Solder joint reliability analysis for electronics equipment.
Strain Gauge and Vibration Measurement and Analysis
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.
Our team of experienced engineers can assist you at any step of your process.
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