Fatigue Life Prediction and Test-CAE Correlation

nCode DesignLife is a design tool that identifies critical locations and calculates realistic fatigue lives from finite element results for metals and composites, allowing engineers to simulate actual loading conditions to avoid costly design changes.

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nCode DesignLife is a CAE-based fatigue analysis system that contains a comprehensive set of solvers and advanced methods for predicting structural durability from major finite element analysis (FEA) result files. It identifies critical locations and calculates realistic fatigue lives for both metals and composites. Design engineers can go beyond performing simplified stress analysis and avoid under- or over-designing products by simulating actual loading conditions to avoid costly design changes.

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Discover key capabilities in DesignLife for efficiently locating critical failures

Simulate actual loading conditions based on FEA results from leading solvers such as ANSYS, Nastran, Abaqus, Altair OptiStruct, LS-Dyna and others.

Perform smarter, quicker physical tests by correlating CAE directly with physical test data in a single environment.

Improve simulation throughput by leveraging hardware scalability with multi-threaded and distributed processing capabilities for processing large finite element models.

Intuitive, graphical interface with functions for multiaxial, welds, short-fibre composite, vibration, crack growth, thermo-mechanical fatigue and more.

Reduce cost and weight by assessing more designs with material parameters derived from in-house materials testing.

Understand performance of new materials with composite-focused modules capable of modeling structural performance and possible failure modes, including fatigue.

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High quality fatigue parameters

The Premium Materials Database contains over 100 fatigue properties primarily for commonly used types of steel and aluminium alloys, plus some other nonferrous materials. These high-quality fatigue parameters include statistical estimates of scatter to enable reliability and certainty of survival to be assessed.

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Fatigue characterisation and material testing

In order to achieve the closest fatigue estimation for design, we recommend using material parameters from material tested in the exact condition. This means using the composition, manufacturing route, and heat treatment condition (including strength) that is directly relevant to the component. These parameters should ideally come from test coupons machined from an actual component.

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FEA fatigue analysis in the HBK Advanced Materials Characterization & Test facility (AMCT)

...engineers are using nCode DesignLife, for instance, to analyze hood slams. After gathering data from three slam velocities, the engineers can run the stress time history through nCode DesignLife to determine the number of cycles required to induce cracking. With this process, nCode DesignLife saves both cost and time in the testing.

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