• Complete plane wing
  • Seismic damper
  • Rotor-blade link
  • Colar panel connection

What is it?

This methodology was developed by NASA in the late ’60s and uses the discretization of the investigated domain into smaller elements. The mathematical models governing elements behavior are known. Through the study of the interactions between the elements and the boundary conditions (loads and constraints), information on the original structure (displacements, stresses and deformations) can be derived.

This information is fundamental in the design phase, both in order to verify the actual capacity of the structure to withstand loads, and to provide guidance to the designer on changes needed to improve the solution.

Why you should choose Vicoter?

Vicoter staff performs FEM analysis since more than 10 years, and can guarantee you an appropriate use of this methodology, allowing your company to save a lot of money for design and for production, by choosing the most appropriate product configuration before manufacturing a prototype. For example, stress analyses can lead to the discovery that your product is under-dimensioned or over-dimensioned compared to the loads that it will experience in operating life. In both cases, this discovery, made before manufacturing your first product, leads to a considerable reduction in costs.

Vicoter is able to perform analysis with different FEM codes in order to study the behavior of the structure from different points of view. In particular, we can perform following analysis:

  • static, resulting in the evolution of deformation, of effort, of displacements, internal forces, and boundary reactions
  • dynamic, obtaining vibration modes, frequency spectra and time responses
  • thermal (convection, conduction and radiation)
  • buckling, resulting in the critical load and associated structural finite displacements
  • damage, resulting in damage birth and propagation
  • noise (internal and external)
  • contact, determining interactions among different bodies both from the point of view of the displacements, and from the point of view of the exchanged forces.

Mainly due to increased calculation capability of modern PC, many companies are nowadays using this approach. So, the concept of virtual prototyping is fully developed. This term defines the ability to highlight all the critical issues of a structure, and to compensate them, during the product development phase with an obvious savings in terms of cost.

In addition, Vicoter is able to arrange courses for the transmission of its know-how to those companies who want to acquire skills regarding this methodology.