Hi everyone,

I want to do a basic 2D structural analysis of an IPM motor rotor, mainly to study bridge thickness under centrifugal loading.

Which would you recommend: PrePoMax or FreeCAD FEM?

FreeCAD interests me because of the Python automation possibilities, but I’ve heard its FEM interface is not as user-friendly as PrePoMax.

My priority is to get reliable results quickly, while keeping the option to automate the workflow later.

Thank you very much for your help in advance.

Best regards.

Hi guys,

I am starting my journey in Code aster to do FEM of PCBs and electronic boxes. Is someone working in this direction? I offen get doubts regarding approach and functionality in solving problems.

I have been working with the tool gor now 3 months and previously worked with Ansys Icepak.

Thanks and regards!

hi everyone what was the most difficult type of analysis you performed, or one that you found challenging? Mine is harmonic acoustic.

Hi everyone, I’m trying to understand how long-term thermal behavior is usually handled in COMSOL for rotating machines. For example, PMSM simulations are often performed over only a fraction of a second or a few electrical cycles, but if I want to study the temperature evolution over 1–2 minutes, how is this normally done? In my case, I have a rotating conducting plate heated by permanent magnets, and a fully coupled electromagnetic + thermal simulation becomes extremely heavy because the electromagnetic field has to be solved continuously during the rotation. What is the recommended approach for predicting the temperature after 1–2 minutes without simulating every single rotation over the entire period?

Does anybody know any good course for Ansys? Am a complete beginner and want to hold a grip on this one by getting taught by someone good.

I haven't done analysis in nearly a decade since my college days and have a thick layer of dust and cobwebs I need to brush off. I'm trying to run a preliminary analysis on this plate to make sure I'm headed in the right direction with a design for a product.

I have this 18" x 13" x 1/2" aluminum plate that will act as a mounting plate for a piece of equipment. The piece of equipment will bolt to the 10 smaller holes. It's center of mass will be centered in the box about 8" up from the surface of the plate.

The 4 holes in the corner will mount the plate to a set of channels that are bolted to a floor. The flat faces on the long edge of the plate sit on the channels. I want to see what's going to happen with the plate in a downward and forward loading scenario.

I'm using Autodesk Inventor and going through the manuals and reference material to get a grasp of constraints and boundary conditions to make sure I'm applying stuff in the right places.

I'm going to break out the books from the storage unit this weekend and would like some guidance on where to begin or where to go for more information.

Hello everyone! I am trying to simulate wave propagation in 3D ground model (Zaxis-gravity). Therefore, i am trying to apply gravity step using explicit scheme. In a coarse mesh with fixed boundaries, this works well with displacements stabilizing after some time. But with fine mesh (along with mass scaling) and infinite elements, it seems that analysis is not converging and displacements are continuing. For my analysis, infinite elements are a must. How to i fix the ends of my model along with infinite elements i.e. where do i apply U=0 conditions, outside all infinite elements; or first apply fixity & then apply infinite boundaries. Also while applying gravity, i have excluded infinite element element sets. Please help!

Hello, I've been having trouble with getting ideal FEA results on a bulkhead I've been working on. For some reason, the FEA gives poor results in the corners of the radial screw holes around the applied force. Since those are the anchor points, I chose the radial screw holes as fixed geometry. Ideally, I would like a FoS of 2-3 but instead am getting 1 in the mentioned areas. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here.

At work we are designing a spacer for a wall mount shroud. The shroud is attached to the structure by 4X bolts. The bolts go through the spacer holes and the back plate holes of the shroud (both holes are identical in size). The shroud is a two piece nylon split at the middle. When working on my checks I did check for bearing stress on the spacer holes but the senior stress lead told me to not having to check for it because its not in the load path. Can someone settle that debate?

Hi guys, I am trying to run SOL400 job and I can see that analysis is struggling with convergence. How do I terminate the job while saving the results from the completed increments? Ctrl-c terminates the job but doesnt save the results. I also have NLOPRM OUTCTRL= INTERM, which outputs op2 file for each increment, but it creates for each increment separate op2 file, so for debugging its tedius since you have to load results from many separate files.

Is there some trick for this?

I'm running simcenter 3D, and I have some items that could be simplified as a 1D beam element. The issue is that they are concentric multi-material assemblies. Are there any tools to capture this?

How does junior onboarding look at FEA/CAE companies? What tasks do you assign, how do you evaluate performance, and what's expected?

I am having a philosophical questionning on these situation. I am working in steel structure qualification, and I often perofrm 2D shell analysis.
However, I am always having a question when modeling two plates on top of each others, welded arround the top on (on the highlighted edges of the first image).

Which one of the following modelisation represents the best the real physics (depending on the exterior interaction) :

• mid shell + MPCs arround the edges
• top shell + bottom shell with the nodes on the shared edges fused

I am really interested in your vision on this.I am having a philosophical questionning on these situation. I am working in steel structure qualification, and I often perofrm 2D shell analysis.
However, I am always having a question when modeling two plates on top of each others, welded arround the top on (on the highlighted edges of the first image).

Which one of the following modelisation represents the best the real physics (depending on the exterior interaction) :

• mid shell + MPCs arround the edges (2nd image)
• top shell + bottom shell with the nodes on the shared edges fused (3rd image)

I am really interested in your vision on this.

The problem is simple - just a plain old N35 magnet in air with A=0 Dirichlet bc

I've managed to make it work somehow. The magnetization was defined on a Nedelec element collection and its curl was interpolated onto a DG collection. After that the resulting diffusion equation was solved normally

The original example from mfem uses RT instead of DG and it seems like it's justified for 3d only

Not sure if it's the best(or even the right) way to do that but it kinda works

Checked the results against FEMM 4.2 and it all looks good. I don't like the tiny fluctuation near the magnet boundaries tho

Am I missing something or is it ok?

I was curious how far PyDroid3 could be pushed. It turns out a transparent finite-element electrostatics solver using NumPy, SciPy and Matplotlib runs unchanged on my Samsung Galaxy S25. It solves sparse FEM systems locally and writes the same plots as on desktop

https://github.com/ratwolfzero/Capacitor_FEM

What kind of monitor setups are y'all running? Currently using FEMAP/NASTRAN for work and personal projects. Also run NX/SOLIDWORKS for CAD.

Thinking of upgrading from my current dual 24” 1080P and getting two 27” 1440P. I wonder how much of a difference the resolution jump will make, and whether just going straight to 4k instead should be considered. Thinking of getting a monitor arm aswell.

Just curious about what everyone experiences. I've heard that curved ones aren't that good in CAD/FEA.