Chassis FEA

[Nitesh]

Hi guys,

I am trying to do some FEA on our spaceframe this year 'cos for the past three years, the frame gets very heavy as we used to put in triangulation members which were sometimes not required. I've tried cosmos 2004 and Algor but both of them refuse to mesh the structure, giving errors at the nodes. cosmos tells me to use Face control but doesn't yeild result. please suggest me some solution or an alternate software which could do the trick. Will be very grateful.

[Faterooski]

We use GRAPE, which is a very simple freeware version of FEA.....perfect for spaceframes like we use. I know we use it, I don't know the exact website that you get it from, but I'm sure you can find it somewhere.

[Denny Trimble]

Here are our previous discussions on chassis FEA (http://fsae.com/eve/forums?a=search&reqWords=chassis+fea&use_forum_scope=on&forum_scope=125607348)

[Nitesh]

Thanks a lot. Was a great help

[Nitesh]

Faterooski, I downloaded the GRAPE, but it doesn't seem to accept solidworks models or any other format which solidworks supports. Do i need to make a new one in some other software in order to use GRAPE?!!!
HELP

[SH]

We have been using GRAPE for a few years, and I'm not super impressed with GRAPE but it seems to do the job, although we have never tested the actual stiffness vs. our results from GRAPE. But in regards on how to use GRAPE... you can't import models directly, you need to find point values (from your SolidWorks model) and type in every point. I know there is probally a very slick way to get these points from SolidWorks but we have not had anyone that wanted to find out how so we have just got all the point locations one by one, instead of writing a little program to automaticly get all these points.