If this is your first FEA Simulation...
Let me tell you why it’s not and it will probably NEVER be...
You know I get it…
When you start FEA simulation for the first time, it can be very overwhelming…
You want to get something simple, you model solved without errors and a color map of displacements and stress contours…
By why are there so many options and settings to do this « simple » thing?
I started like that too.
I did a few tutorials and I understood that there was some kind of workflow to follow to finish the simulation…
First, importing the model and setting up the mesh…
Then applying the boundary conditions…
…and finally, you get to click on the « solve » button, wait, and if you are lucky, you get your colors.
Of course, most of the time, you get an error which tells you in a cryptical way that there is an error in your model but that’s often difficult to say either what went wrong or how (and even less why…)
(BTW, If you are getting THAT specific error... check if you have the libopenblas installed or not... just sayin...)
After completing a few models, I thought I had a grasp on the workflow and that I could simulate « most of the systems » I wanted…
You guessed that I was wrong…
In fact at that time, I was more concerned about how the model « looked » in CAD, rather than how to simulate it realistically.
The professor told us that linear static analysis was a big approximation of the reality and that there were much more types of simulation out there to simulate more complex stuffs (nonlinear, dynamics…)
…But for me at the time, It doesn’t mean much and I just thought: « If if works like that, It’s probably good enough… »
Second time I was wrong that day…
The problem is that ...I didn’t know I was wrong!
…And if you are like me, when you don’t know yourself you are wrong, the professor (or even any expert) can tell you anything to convince you, it will always enter from one ear and go out from the other… right?
A lot of the stuff you learn in engineering has to be learned practically to be registered by our brain as important… You have to get the « Gut feeling » that you did something wrong in order to start to open yourself to true understanding…and become able to correct your own mistakes.
Now Probably what you are wondering is...
How did this true understanding "came" to me?
As usual... you need to be challenged a bit to start putting in question your way of seeing things...
That happened quite a few years later…when I started to have real project to solve with FEA… That’s when the real game started.
It wasn’t anymore about getting « coloured map of stresses », it was about getting critical results to prevent failure or improve mechanical systems.
So… with my initial poor understanding of the topic at the time, you can say I got a real slap in the face…
Cyprien "FEA-slapped in the face" Rusu
