For general purpose FEA I recommend NEiNastran from Noran. There are many posts on the subject on eng-tips and people give opinions of this and other products. I would check these out.
Hans
I would also look at NEi Nastran which has excellent Solidworks integration and also supports Pro/E through a direct interface. I would get a demo disk and also challenge their support group to demo an example similar to your application. Cosmos will have much better integration with...
Try running a normal modes analysis to see what parts of the model are flying away or hinging which would indicate an area which is not properly constrained.
I am very happy to see that the people eng-tips cleaned up this thread. Garland, I like your postings and find you very helpful. I appreciate the Algor info. Thanks.
I could be wrong but I think all modules of NEi Nastran contain composites. They do not license this seperately. Your sales person can probably help you there.
As for composites capabilities they seem to have it all. I took their 2 day training class and it was very helpful. There is an...
We just purchased our 3rd license of NEi Nastran and I highly recommend it. MD Nastran is just MSC Nastran with some new packaging. It is also very expensive and you will end up with a lot of features you do not need. You can probably get NEi Nastran for less than your MSC maintenance. NX...
We just purchased our 3rd license of NEi Nastran and I highly recommend it. MD Nastran is just MSC Nastran with some new packaging. It is also very expensive and you will end up with a lot of features you do not need. You can probably get NEi Nastran for less than your MSC maintenance. NX...
Run a normal modes analysis with all constraints removed. You should have 6 rigid modes followed by flexible modes. More than 6 rigid modes means you have mechanisms. You will see where they are from the mode shapes. Output strain energy and that will help show bad elements in the rigid mode...
Ansys and Abaqus are good codes but have their short comings as well. Abaqus requires a lot of training to use properly. Ansys can also be difficult to use and is expensive. Again, just my opinion.
ALG/Nastran is a simply Algor with a Nastran translator to convert the input deck to Algor's...
On this subject I would like to add my opinion. Please take this as just that, an opinion because I do not use Algor or Cosmos or Abaqus now though I did previously, I use Nastran. The variety of Nastran does not matter in this context because all the major nastrans handle dynamics loads...