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Predict your product’s fatigue life before you build it

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Ansys nCode DesignLife works with Ansys Mechanical to reliably evaluate fatigue life. Using the results of finite element analysis (FEA) from Ansys Mechanical, it calculates stresses and strains, then cumulates damage from repetitive loading to determine a product’s predicted life. You can quickly evaluate the effects of different materials and alternative geometries for new designs, and then optimize them for the product’s expected usage — long before the first prototype is built.

Capabilities

Ansys nCode DesignLife, the industry-leading tool for durability analysis, gives you a comprehensive diagnostic fatigue process to predict your product’s operational lifetime. It is fully integrated into Ansys Workbench for ease of use and smooth workflow. You can create complex loading “duty cycles” based on measurements that represent real-life forces on products, or use anticipated loading histories.

Fatigue analysis process

Once created, the fatigue process can be captured and reused. Engineers without fatigue expertise can evaluate modified product designs to determine the updated product life. Start-to-end automation avoids the majority of errors and ensures consistency, especially in large organizations in which multiple engineers might be analyzing the results.

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Ansys nCode DesignLife Capabilities

Ease of Use

By leveraging the direct connection from geometry to analysis to completed fatigue study, you can accelerate the development process to deliver world class products. Parametric analysis produces complete analysis results for a series of design variations at the click of a mouse. Using this workflow process and performing parametric simulations, you can optimize a complex structure for the desired product life — and save valuable engineering and design time. It’s also easy to set up fatigue life optimization using the Ansys Workbench integrated DesignXplorer.

Extensive Fatigue Material Library

Fatigue modeling relies heavily on material data to predict the life and damage of components during their lifetime. Ansys nCode DesignLife comes with a comprehensive material library covering a wide range of metals: aluminum, steel, titanium, copper and cast Iron are included as part of the standard installation. Many materials include variations of properties to take into account the rolling, forging and casting of the raw material.

An optional premium material library is also available to include more exotic and recently tested materials in your simulations.

State-of-the-art Fatigue Modeling Capabilities

For calculation of fatigue life and fatigue damage using either a strain-life-based method for low cycle fatigue analysis or stress life for high cycle fatigue, you can understand how parts and assemblies will behave under loading conditions beyond single loading scenarios.

You can also use the Dang Van criterion to take into account the microscopic stresses and strains within critical grains and calculate the endurance limit as a safety factor.

Ansys nCode DesignLife calculates non-proportionality and the biaxial ratio, and then selects the best method to use when performing calculations.

Hot-spot detection identifies critical areas automatically, so you can zoom in on problematic regions, identify the source of failure quickly and implement fixes.

Seam welds can be modeled and fatigue life can be accurately calculated including fillet, overlap and laser welded joints. This method is appropriate for weld toe, root and throat failures.

Ansys nCode DesignLife can also simulate a virtual shaker table test environment that could be used for test and material calibration.

Composite materials can also be analyzed using Ansys nCode DesignLife with industry standard failure criteria.

Also available

• Vibration fatigue
• Thermo-Mechanical Fatigue

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