Calculate stress range for several load sets...

[mlindqvist]

I need to evaluate "stress range", i.e. max principal stress minus min principal stress, for fatigue evaluation.

This is very tedious work if you need to compare several load directions (in my case a rotating load, typically defined in 12 directions: 30 degree pitch).

Let's say the max prin occurs for a specific load direction for a specific location in the model. I basically need to look at all other load sets for that point, to find the minimum principal stress, to find out what the stress range is.

Does anyone know of any technique to do this in a more convenient way?

I suspect it should be possible to request ASCII-output results for different load sets, and write some script to go through the entire model node by node, but that would require some programming. Has anyone done this?

Any other suggestion?

/Mats Lindqvist/

[unickque · Accepted solution]

You could buy fatigue software that will eat Creo results (I know FE-SAFE will do it), but that will cost you some $$$.

Then again, if you are building something yourself you will spend many many hours building it, so it will cost a lot also, without guaranteed results at the end, and possible need to rewrite your code at the next Creo update. On the plus side: you will learn a lot from it

Compromise: find a company that can do the fatigue analysis for you using some good software, and get a good deal because they only need to post-process your FEA results.