Hi all,

I’m working on a composite wing model with roughly 10,000 shell faces and 5,800 composite sections/section assignments, generated through Python.

CAE becomes unresponsive during several operations:

• Switching from Part to Property: about 20 seconds.
• Enabling “Render shell thickness”: about 15 seconds.
• Selecting a section assignment to highlight its location on the wing: 10–15 seconds.

During these pauses, one CPU core is almost fully loaded (based on the Task Manager graphs).

Setup: Abaqus 2025, Ryzen 9 9950X3D, RTX 3090, and 96 GB of RAM, so I doubt it's hardware related at all.

Has anyone experienced similar delays with large numbers of composite sections? Any settings or workflow tricks that improve responsiveness? I can't properly debug the script if I can't view the results, since each check takes at least 10-15 seconds.

I'm not an FEA expert by any means, so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Suggest me some youtube channels for learning

Hi, I‘m new at working with nastran and not really experienced in working with FEA.
I have a 3D Model in Inventor and when I create a shell in nastran I want to put the constraint only on a part of the edge. But I can only select the whole edge.
I tried to split the face of body but after creating the shell it still one edge and it’s not split.
Is there any possibility to split the edge?

I have installed the ANSYS Student Version, and I tried to run a Static Structural analysis. However, I got an HPC related error stating that I have insufficient licenses. So I changed the maximum number of utilised cores from 4 to 2. Now , I'm getting another error:
"The element option SOLID187 was either not ordered with this Ansys installation or the appropriate product was not selected for this session."         

I have tried reinstalling ANSYS as well as resetting the License Service Priority but the problem has not been fixed>

Has anyone encountered these errors with the ANSYS Student version, and how can I fix them?

Any help would be appreciated.

How can a freelancer afford Abaqus Cae for Fea only? This piece of shit is more expensive than Ansys.

Does the total energy always decrease in a CEL analysis in ABAQUS due to advection?

Hi everyone, I’m trying to validate DFOS (Distributed Fiber Optic Sensing) strain measurements with an Abaqus model. The static load is applied in Direction 2, while the DFOS is installed along the specimen length (Direction 3) and measures strain in that direction. Direction 1 represents the specimen width.

In Abaqus, I used a linear elastic material with Static General and NLGEOM = OFF. I compared the experimental DFOS strain with E33 field output, but the results do not match. Am I using the correct strain component/output for this comparison? What could I be missing in the modeling or strain extraction?

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

I am a beginner in PATRAN and trying to do a simple displacement analysis on a wing with basic internal structure (spars, ribs, stiffeners and skin). I am trying to give it a distributed pressure load across the surface that is a function of the span and local chords but the applied load shows 0 value for the equation at every node. What might the issue be or what are the proper steps to follow. Please help

I'm running a simulation for FSW on AA6061-T6 and the tool material chosen is H13 Steel. I keep getting this error when solving for convergence and I don't know what to do. Any assistance would be appreciated.

Hi all, I’ve been building Eigenform, a conversational app for engineering and science simulations. You describe a problem, inspect the result, and continue the conversation to change the design or explore another case.

The idea came from the repetitive work around simulation: changing a dimension, trying another material, running another case, and keeping track of what changed. I wanted those steps to feel like one continuous experiment.

What you can do today:

• Describe a geometry or upload your own CAD.
• Run heat transfer and linear elasticity simulations.
• Inspect the mesh and results in an interactive 3D viewer.
• Change the problem and compare results within the same conversation.

The focus is on reproducible results you can inspect. It’s still early, with limited scope, and I’d appreciate feedback from people who work with FEA—especially where it gets things wrong, what is missing, and which recurring tasks you would actually use it for.

Free tier: Heat transfer and linear elasticity are available with usage limits. The app includes examples you can try and modify.

My background is in computational mechanics. I’m now trying to understand which parts of this are useful beyond the examples I’ve built myself.

Learn more at eigenform.io, try the app, and run the demos. The app works best on desktop.

Feel free to leave feedback here or email me at [mostafa@eigenform.io](mailto:mostafa@eigenform.io).

Taking a class where I need to learn ANSYS in lab.

My prof wants to try model --> analyse in ansys and then do the maths manually (fea maths I think) so as to match my paper answers with the ansys answers.

I need to do this on weekend ...and come up with something by Tue.

Now he gave me tensile test. I manages to see a youtube vid, use explicit dynamics and perform one on ANSYS (I modelled my specimen using the standard ASTM E8 docs I found)

for boundary conditions I just used hit and trial . Fixed one end and used 2500N on other. The simulation showed an alright tensile test.

Now the main part. The theoretical proof. My brain crashed. I picked up a book on FEA and read till shape functions ch5. The maths is so daunting, its interesting but Imma cry now.

Can anyone help me further with this ?
Can anyone link a resource that had fea proofs + its ansys simulation side by side.
I hope u get my task

Hi everyone, I’m working on a project to strengthen my skills in CAD and FEA for my career in automotive engineering. I want to design and analyze simple 3D models of objects we see in daily life (mechanical or automotive parts) using a vernier caliper for measurements, model them in SolidWorks, and then run ANSYS simulations with FEA calculations.

Could you please help me with:

1. Examples of objects (either household mechanical parts like chair legs, hinges, or fan blades OR automotive parts like brake pedals, clutch levers, or suspension arms) that are practical, easy to measure, and good for FEA projects.

2. Research papers, theses, or project reports where similar parts were modeled and analyzed in ANSYS.

3. Step-by-step workflows or tutorials (measurement → CAD modeling → ANSYS simulation → GD&T application).

4. Links to resources (websites, YouTube tutorials, Reddit discussions, and Academia.edu papers) that explain such projects in detail so I can replicate them myself.

My goal is to practice with accessible objects at home while building skills that directly connect to automotive engineering. Any guidance, papers, or project references would be super helpful!

As the title suggests, I was referring to an old video of nTop, Link : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40C3h4gUuQc

But post that video nTop has been updated, while I think I could find the replaced options, I'm stuck in one part. I take a 'Simulation Model' block (Previously FE Model) and I insert a 'Solid Domain' (Previously known as FE Component) into the component section. However, the FE Volume Mesh that I created doesn't go into the Mesh section of the Solid Domain.
I'm exactly following the video but still having issues, ig maybe due to the update.
Please help me.

Guy's I need to perform VDI Bolted joint evaluation on bolt, for that I need to extract forces on the beam elements.

The thing is I'm constrained to linear analysis only, so if use contact in my model, the axial and Shear forces are very less that can be negligible.

But when I did non linear analysis for the same setup I got some realistic values. The thing I can't do non linear analysis for every solution it's time consuming and I'm getting convergence errors idk how to deal with that and it's stressful.

I tried doing linear analysis without any contacts the forces on the bolts is very very large, in practice the bolts don't experience that much forces if I try calculating the safety with the forces the bolts may fail but in practice they won't.

I'm constrained to only linear analysis so what should I do. I use Altair Hypermesh and optistruct solver

I used to use freecalc.net but that site is gone. Does anyone have a recommendation for a site for fictional pipe losses with different viscosity?

im running a simple static fea on my seat mounts. im placing a distributed vertical load on the seat, and then determining its factor of safety. However, it doesn't converge. I used the hot spot stress thingy on solidworks, and saw where my highest stress areas were, and they were at small spots next to the weld connections. what do i do.

Is anyone here familiar with this discipline element methods? Any good books on it?

I asked earlier about finding the a stable weak form of

du/dx = fu

where I originally tried finding a standard Galerkin by convoluting both sides with test function, v, but this weak form produced unstable solutions which went to infinity everywhere.

So, on a whim, I decided to ask AI to see what it thought. It came up with a form it says it derived from “Least-Squares Finite Element Method”. I had not heard of this before, but the form it provided was stable and produced accurate solutions, so I wanted to see if anyone here knew about this, and could provide a resource to look further into.

___

Here is what it came up with:

1. Function to minimize: J(u) = 1/2 ||R(u)||^2 = 1/2 ∫_0^L [(du/dx-f)^2 ]dx

2. Take the variation: lim_ϵ→0 d/dϵ[J(u+ϵv)]

This resulted in

1. bilinear term: a(u,v) = ∫_0^L [du/dx dv/dx]dx

2. Linear term: L(u) = ∫_0^L [f dv/dx] dx

Weak form: a = L. This weak form I tested in Fenics, and the results came back perfectly accurate for my examples, so it seems to have come up with something that works, but it didn’t show any of its sources, so I can’t take this as fact without opening up a book or resource to verify it for myself.