Does anyone know of any affordable ( for an old retired geezer) stress analysis software that will run on a Windows based fairly powerful PC?
Al the neat stuff stayed at work when I retired.
Howard
Does anyone know of any affordable ( for an old retired geezer) stress analysis software that will run on a Windows based fairly powerful PC?
Al the neat stuff stayed at work when I retired.
Howard
Well, you could do what us poor engineering undergrads do and dl SolidWorks of kazaa.... or not.
If you want, I could look into getting you a student version of it, much cheaper than the standard version. But I dunno if its worth the hassle. I've heard SolidWorks' stress analyzer is good but never tried it out.
solidworks has a stress analyzer?!?! i didnt know that, damn i'll have to check that out. we've got a few different ones here at school, if you want i can look and see what they're called and who makes 'em.
solidworks has a stress analyzer?!?! i didnt know that, damn i'll have to check that out. we've got a few different ones here at school, if you want i can look and see what they're called and who makes 'em.
yeah, several people have told me that if you get really into solid works it has a stress analyzer... as i said, whether its any good or not, i dunno, but I know that the program costs thousands of dollars for some reason normally
Yeah, Solidworks has a stress analysis program built into it. Its called COSMOS EXPRESS if I recall correctly.
I dont think it is a very advanced Finite Element Analysis program though as it takes no time at all to compute stresses.
ANSYS is a hardcore FEA program that can accept drawings from a solid modeler such as SolidWorks or Autodesk Inventor. ANSYS is really hard to use though and I wouldnt reccomend trying that out unless you took a class for it. (Not to mention it costs quite a bit itself).
COSMOS EXPRESS is extremely easy to use in comparison to ANSYS. I was able to figure it out on my own where as with ANSYS I still barely can use after takin the class.
Pro-E Solid Modeling software has some FEA built in I think.....but again, you're talking $15k per seat... I'd like to get my hands on it, but I didn't have the time to work with our Formula SAE team and snake a copy.
Algor was one of the first to offer a PC-based FEA package - maybe 12 years ago (it's the one I learned on back then). I don't know how far it's come - there was a time about 5-6 years ago when the rest of the industry really swept past Algor's technology, but it was always a decent, reasonably competent package.
All of these packages - Cosmos for SolidWorks, Mechanica for ProEngineer, maybe Algor - are increasingly easy to use. So easy, that you don't need to understand the math behind them. Higher end products like ANSYS and Nastran are still, thankfully, too complicated for the novice to get very far with. Very scary - that ease of use has gotten some people into real trouble by producing credible-looking results that were just dead wrong. Be very careful with these packages and keep in mind how much you know (or don't) when interpreting results - good luck!
MSC.Nastran has an education edition that limits you to 1000 nodes / 500 elements for $200. If you're looking for 2D work or very limited 3D work with a linear formulation (small deformation) and linear material behavior - probably a decent choice. I'm looking into it myself.
An ABAQUS education edition used to be available if you want more, but I'm not sure if it's around anymore (educ. ed. - not ABAQUS!).