FEA general guidelines and/or Tips & Tricks

Does anyone have a good general guidelines document for running FEA
specifically CosmosWorks? I know this is a very broad topic
but... I guess this is what I'm after.

1. General rules of thumb through usage and experience.
(Best practices if you will)
2. Model Simplification processes.
3. Setup and constraint tips and tricks.
4. Tips and tricks in general.

I know I'm probably asking a lot but we are trying to learn
the art of FEA and get the most out of the software without
getting complete BS.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Don Van Zile

 

1. Roark and Young, most recent addition. Read and understand the first
several chapters.

2. Building Better Products with Finite Element Analysis by Vince
Adamas.

The first book has a good outline of failure modes and what is involved
in checking them and has nothing to do with FEA. The second book has to
do with using FEA to do the calculations necessary to understand the
failure modes in the first book.

 

One problem with FEA is that the use community is much smaller, and
experts are few and far between. It's hard to get help and/or new
ideas or opinions and insight working alone.

At my last job, we actually has in our budget money for an FEA
consultant to come in and review our work periodically. This was money
well spent. We used about 10 hours a year.

Vince Adams used to host conferences in the Chicago area ("MESH"
conferences, they were called). These were great opportunities for
analysts to get together and get a look at the FEA world beyond their
desks.

Vince is now employed by Impact Engineering Solutions. They won't pony
up for more MESH conferences, but they do have some good onine
seminars. See <http://www.impactengsol.com> for details.