CAE / FEA

Overview

As part of my engineering studies I learned to use Computer Aided Engineering (Finite Element Analysis) to simulate structural events on model parts. This helped determine how strong a part needed to be — and in which material — to satisfy the design requirements with an acceptable safety factor.

The process involved modelling a part in SolidWorks, generating a mesh, and simulating it under unit or cyclic loads. An important step was iterative mesh refinement: a draft mesh gives a rough answer, then refinement converges on a reliable result.