How can you educate others about FEA in Automotive Engineering?

For the basics part, educating someone who is not familiar with the FEA concepts. I start with a FBD (free body diagrams) in the static phase and explain how the loading conditions and boundary conditions are modelled to be in an equilibrium state to attain the load distributions and stress. Using these diagrams helps others to visualize the model setup and expect the loading conditions behaviour. Other than that, conducting multiple workshops teaching the basic fundamentals and concepts of FEA among the cross-functional teams in the company helps others what to expect when they request FEA on certain design problems and also understand its limitations so that they don’t request something which is beyond its capabilities.

Focus on building the standards which could be used for ready reference to new team members. Provide a comprehensive explanation of the basic principles of FEA, including discretization, meshing, boundary conditions, loads, and material properties. Illustrate these concepts using simple examples before moving on to automotive-specific applications.

Education about FEA and its application in the automotive industry has to start early. This needs to start in college where the student has to be exposed to this subject, let him know the potential of the subject and also how it can be a fruitful career path for him. There needs to be more industry- academic partnerships to promote students to take up this career.

I think most important thing in this regard would be the approach one follows to train, fea is just small portion of the product cycle, once the student is familiar with where and why we use FEA , then fea is just mathematics

Along the degree in Mechanical Engineering, I had the opportunity to study the FEA method. That basic and important knowledge led me to achieve expertise and experience in modeling, analisys and optimization.

I consistently rely on the following example: Given the certification and rating standards today, designing a passenger vehicle without extensive crash simulations, covering high-speed, low-speed, and pedestrian protection, is simply not feasible.

FEA is an integral part of the automotive design process as it permits the engineer to better understand the behaviour, mechanical and thermal of the various components they are working on. So providing the engineer with real world knowledge of and applications of FEA will provide them with a better understanding of the importance of FEA.

FEA is extensively used in the automotive world to run simulations to check the crashworthiness of vehicles, behavior of parts under forces in particular directions, behavior of parts under failure etc. In simple words, FEA saves the cost of crashing vehicles, which ultimately tells us a lot more about cost cutting and theoretical results which takes us more close to the real life scenarios but not exact same as them.

Someone said it very rightly that - without data we are just an opinion. So without data and real life applications, examples its difficult convey the need of the FEA system. In my view its always important to show the real world application as examples. How FE analysis and calculations help to optimise and make designs robust for end users under severe environmental conditions. Be it tiny USB drive or massive aircraft, FE analysis made our lives much easier in designing the system very safe and secure. Also FE analysis helps us in planning right Design verification plan for the product during its real world application. Real world examples also help us in taking necessary care to perform FE Analysis.

Utilize case studies, projects, and demonstrations to illustrate FEA's role in designing and testing components, systems, and vehicles. Emphasize how FEA ensures compliance with industry standards, regulations, and customer expectations. Augment presentations with visual aids like images, videos, and animations to enhance engagement and convey complex FEA concepts. Integrating hands-on experiences and showcasing tangible outcomes reinforces understanding, providing a comprehensive insight into FEA's significance and practical applications in the automotive engineering domain.

1. Be accurate with your FBDs which will give you a view of what is actually required and whether the direction in which you are is wrong or right. 2. Loading conditions should be accurate. 3. Understand the outcomes properly. 4. Study similar examples first. 5. Take views from your fellow designers / CAD/ FEA Experts as well.

If you are looking into working with FEA, you have won half the battle. If you think every scenario has to be physically validated, you are missing the point of the exercise. We always tested the extremals through physical verification to generate hard data, and then interpolated all possible scenarios to mitigate the breadth of the design strategy. FEA saved us about 60% in costs and improved design coherence by an order of magnitude. Turn around times are so rapid that you can not design effectively without FEA. Yes NCAP will crash cars, but it is mighty useful to know that you have brought a 5 star vehicle for testing beforehand. I will not put my family into anything lesser. And neither should you.

Sharing lessons learnt, best practices which also form of tips and tricks, makes beginners , freshers easy to understand where system works well and where they can expect risks. I have made it habit to create lessons learnt data and share it with team after every project. Because this will save lot of time of coworkers, also this will create an open culture for team members to share their tips & tricks. So its always bidirectional. Sharing of trips n tricks also enhance *first time right * deliverables by avoiding known pitfalls.

In my experience start from here, learn what each parameter quantifies on further building the whole model. Each parameter has significant role in how model is discretised and developed further for simulation.

Every skill, technology or product exists for a reason. I would start from explaining why do you need FEA. Historically it was developed to test performance without spending millions in building models/prototypes and conducting destructive testing. So the core was how do we make this cheaper and faster and avoid designing mistakes before they happen. FEA in conjunction with CAE tools helps us model physical world on a chipset and the destructive testings as a set of loads and stresses that can be simulated way faster. Finite Element Analysis means to break computer model in multiple tiny pieces that are representative of physical building blocks, giving us a digital playground to simulate real world scenarios.

FUNDAMENTALS CONCEPTS: Break down the fundamental concepts of FEA, including mesh generation, boundary conditions, material properties, and load application. Use visual aids, diagrams, and real-world to illustrate these concepts.