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Failure Modes: Understand the 5 most common failure types

February 15, 2017 by Cyprien 31 Comments

Many engineers I meet don’t know there are several failure modes… They think: « That’s pretty simple… you apply a load, the load is too heavy, so your system fails and breaks… » Ok. I acknowledge that this is obvious… systems can break under a heavy loading. In fact… even a 3 years old would understand […]

Free Body Diagram: Why is it useful in FEA?

January 31, 2017 by Cyprien 15 Comments

If you are tackling static* problems with FEA, there is a basic tool that will help you a lot: The Free Body Diagram (FBD). If you are trying to analyze static mechanisms, you probably heard this name before… But do you know what it is and how it actually works? That’s what this article is […]

Buckling in FEA: A simple explanation and demonstration

January 6, 2017 by Cyprien 27 Comments

Hundreds of engineers asked me about buckling and every time, the way that I explain it makes them understand almost immediately how it works. That’s what I’ll share with you today for the beginning of 2017 :) Buckling is very simple to understand with the simple following example. Imagine that you are pushing a parallelepipedic […]

Safety factor: How do I calculate that?

December 26, 2016 by Cyprien 22 Comments

This article talks explains the concept of safety factor and how it is calculated. It’s a fundamental notion that every mechanical engineer have to understand well. How do I know if the design of my part is « safe » enough? That’s a difficult question that many designers asked themselves. One of the potential answers involves the […]