FEA Report Guidelines
FEA Report Guidelines
Presenting your finite element analysis well is as important as doing your FEA correctly, no matter whether you study at university or do your job in career. How well you present an FEA will be assessed in this unit. The bottom line is to persuade readers to trust your FE results. As there are no formulas for the readers to check your calculations, writing a good FEA report sounds particularly important. Generally, a good FEA report should cover the following contents.
Introduction
This section should briefly describe the nature of the physical problem that you are going to study, and justify the use of finite element analysis to study the problem.
Model Description
This section should provide sufficient details about all aspects of the FEA model, so that the model can be reproduced by the readers.
•
Modelling platform – software (including version number), program, etc.
•
Geometry – dimensional information, simplification (2D or symmetric), etc.
•
Mesh - element types, element shape, number of elements, etc.
•
Boundary conditions – supports, constraints, loads, etc.
•
Material properties – stress-strain curves, other material parameters, etc.
Illustrations are often found helpful to describe the geometry, mesh, and boundary conditions.
Tables are often used to list material parameters, especially when more than one material is involved in the model.
In addition, the validity or accuracy of the FE model needs to be justified, usually in two ways:
a) Mesh convergence study - demonstrate that the mesh provides a converged result. A mesh convergence plot is essential to show the convergence of flag value with increasing number of elements.
b) Compare the FE results to analytical solutions or experimental data. (This can be carried out in the next section - Results and Discussion.)
Results and Discussion
This section presents the results output from the FE analysis. For a structural/stress analysis, the most common results of
Presenting your finite element analysis well is as important as doing your FEA correctly, no matter whether you study at university or do your job in career. How well you present an FEA will be assessed in this unit. The bottom line is to persuade readers to trust your FE results. As there are no formulas for the readers to check your calculations, writing a good FEA report sounds particularly important. Generally, a good FEA report should cover the following contents.
Introduction
This section should briefly describe the nature of the physical problem that you are going to study, and justify the use of finite element analysis to study the problem.
Model Description
This section should provide sufficient details about all aspects of the FEA model, so that the model can be reproduced by the readers.
•
Modelling platform – software (including version number), program, etc.
•
Geometry – dimensional information, simplification (2D or symmetric), etc.
•
Mesh - element types, element shape, number of elements, etc.
•
Boundary conditions – supports, constraints, loads, etc.
•
Material properties – stress-strain curves, other material parameters, etc.
Illustrations are often found helpful to describe the geometry, mesh, and boundary conditions.
Tables are often used to list material parameters, especially when more than one material is involved in the model.
In addition, the validity or accuracy of the FE model needs to be justified, usually in two ways:
a) Mesh convergence study - demonstrate that the mesh provides a converged result. A mesh convergence plot is essential to show the convergence of flag value with increasing number of elements.
b) Compare the FE results to analytical solutions or experimental data. (This can be carried out in the next section - Results and Discussion.)
Results and Discussion
This section presents the results output from the FE analysis. For a structural/stress analysis, the most common results of