Structural FEA for Product Design: Loads, Mesh, and Acceptance

Use FEA when hand calculations are ambiguous: plastic snap hooks, mixed-material assemblies, thin-wall enclosures under drop load, or welded brackets with stress concentrations.

Skip FEA for trivial parts only when loads and geometry are textbook — otherwise a half-day simulation saves a tool rework.

Mesh: Refine at fillets, holes, and snap roots; use quadratic elements where plastic nonlinearities matter.

Materials: Use strain-rate or nonlinear plastic data for impact; linear elastic is fine for first-pass metal brackets.

Contacts: Bonded vs frictional vs bolt pretension — document assumptions. Wrong contact often matters more than mesh density.

Define load cases explicitly: static equipment weight, impact factor, thermal expansion, combined worst-case. Compare against material yield with your required safety factor (1.5–2.0 typical for metal product design).

Report peak stress location, not just pass/fail — designers need geometry hints (radius, gusset, rib).

Iterate geometry — do not only thicken globally. Local gussets, radii, and rib direction changes beat uniform wall increases for weight and cost.

Ohmframe delivers FEA for enclosures, robotics structures, and marine brackets, plus Simulation Report formatting for client-ready PDFs.