feature based FEA VS mesh based FEA

[palex]

My compagnie put me in charge of finding an FEA software that will allow us to run analyses on our shelving systems. Being new to FEA, I'm trying to gather all the valuable information (as opposed to junk)I can.

We built metal shelng systems out of thin metal sheets (0.03&quotwhich are reinforced with an underlying structure of C channels (0.105&quot.

My question is this one : " Should we gat an in-cad sofware which allows us to import our geometrie directly from our 3d modeliser (Inventor), like Algor, DesignSpace or cosmos/designstar, or should we get a software in which we would have to recreate our geometrie, like nastran our ansys pro.

I know that our model will required a sofware that can deal with large displacements.

thanks

 

[corus]

Being able to import geometry is useful for 3D solids with complex geometry. For other types of gemeotry it is easier to build your own geometry as on most occasions a lot of the detail is not required for FE models. For large displacement analysis you will need a package that can perform non-linear analysis. For small models you may be able to get a cut-down version of a package. ANSYS used to have one that limited the number of nodes to 500, I think. This may be all you need for a shell and beam model of a shelf.

 

[cb1990]

Be very careful here. It is easy to make the wrong purchase, and it can be a costly mistake. Most FEA packages can read geometry from various CAD packages. You should have no problem there if you make sure that your packages include the proper translators. The question you face with regards to FEA should be answered by taking a good hard look at what questions you need to answer with FEA, and how much you are willing to spend on FEA software and training.

Good luck,

cb1990