when real life and fea meet

MODEL VALIDATION BECOMES THE FOCUS FOR BUILDING THE CHASSIS OF A BAJA SAE VEHICLE. ONE STUDENT OFFERS HIS ADVICE FOR MAKING SMART CHOICES WHILE USING FEA.

BEFORE COMPUTERS AND DESIGN AIDS were readily accessible to the engineering community, mechanisms and machines were unable to be thoroughly optimized. The amount of calculation required to perform a true part optimization was way too extensive and impractical to do by hand. The arrival of accessible calculating power led to massive improvements in the part optimization field.

This software is user-friendly but has reached a point where the user can do almost anything and still get plausible results that can lead to dramatic consequences if one does not consider a great number of FEA analyses as assumptions. Extensive research must be done to make sure that the predictions made by the software in the particular design being tested are true. This article uses the first-hand example of an École de Technologie Supérieure (ETS) Motorsports Baja SAE chassis to explain the steps of FEA model validation.