Using FEA in off-highway design

The process of considering weld redundancy in virtual simulation is a complex way of ensuring that weldment design is robust enough to prevail over accidental weld redundancy that might occur during manufacturing.

FEA plays a major role in the design evolution of new products. There are various stages in the product-development cycle at which FEA provides inputs for design change. And in such instances, a particular “next stage” is not initiated until FEA predicts that the given design would not fail for the specified loads.

However, FEA simulation always predicts the primary failure mode assuming that there is no redundancy in the product. For components like the chassis (especially that of off-highway equipment), having more than 400 manual welds, it is practically impossible to ensure that all the products have zero redundancy due to various uncertainties involved in the manufacturing phases. This makes it vital to consider a few of the worst-case redundancy situations in FEA to ensure that every single product that rolls off the line has quality that exceeds customer expectations.