Integration of fatigue analysis in FEM solver for faster more reliable process

Abstract

Fatigue analysis is established in industrial applications. The findings are used for the design of components in lightweight construction.The classic fatigue analysis leads to additional requirements for the simulation process. The exchange of large amounts of data between software/compute servers with different interface formats is necessary. The implementation and error-free use of this process is the responsibility of the user. In addition to data handling, the different release periods of the software involved must also be considered.The full integration of the fatigue analysis into a general FEM solver solves the process issue (Fig. 1). Both parts of the analysis, the classic stress analysis, and the fatigue analysis, are based on a common data model and use the same resources. This ensures data efficiency (large data stays internal, double data handling is avoided) and the import/export of intermediate results is no longer necessary.Stress gradients, which were previously additionally calculated by the fatigue software based on its own model data, are now available in better quality directly within the FEM software based on the original FEM model. This can be used to increase the quality of the results. Due to the elimination of data exchange and the HPC orientation of the FEM software, the integrated fatigue analysis benefits significantly in terms of performance.New analysis classes are made possible by reduced amounts of data. Thanks to the integration, the complete stress results for all calculation steps no longer must to be saved, but are used directly ("on-the-fly") by the fatigue analysis in each calculation step and then immediately deleted again. This significant process improvement means that new classes of model sizes and significantly more result steps can be considered. The results are then much more accurate.The focus is on process simplification and reducing computing time for industrial applications.