Finite Element Analysis allows you to solve any engineering problem. This means you can verify a product/structure without any prototypes! Also, FEA allows for a great presentation of outcomes, making your reports look super professional. Finally, mastering FEA have an incredibly positive impact on your career!

Solving the unsolvable!

There is one huge advantage of Finite Element Analysis. You can reliably solve problems with it that are impossible to calculate otherwise. But before we get into that, let’s deal with something I hear all the time:

I think it’s reasonable to divide engineering problems into several categories:

• Simple problems within the linear domain. The classical “simply supported beam” goes here. If you can reliably solve your problem with hand calculations, there is no advantage of using FEA. Well, maybe the way outcomes are presented can be an advantage… but I wouldn’t learn FEA for this alone!
• Complex problems with closed mathematical solutions. This is a funny group. There are problems you can accurately solve with hand calculations, but the equations and procedures are so complex that they make you cringe! In such cases, FEA offers a quicker and more pleasant way of dealing with such designs, which is a huge advantage in my book!
• Problems you can only estimate. I will make a big claim here: almost everything can be estimated. More or less accurately but it can be. I admit, however, that some estimations will be so inaccurate… that they are useless in design, making the problem “unsolvable”. With FEA, you can solve the same problems almost perfectly! Not only you will get “better outcomes”, but also you will be more certain about them. Since estimations are risky, codes and design procedures place a lot of safety factors on such designs. This is clearly seen in many industries leading to uneconomical design. You can read about this problem in silos design here. In those cases, FEA is pure gold! It allows you to accurately design stuff and perform optimization you couldn’t do otherwise! This is when it shines, and allows you to develop your career as an expert!

Where FEA shines?

If you are mostly solving the simplest problems FEA won’t give you much. My experience is, however, that people rarely do the simple stuff anymore. We tend to optimize everything so much, that we are encountering new problems all the time. Meaning that even the simple tasks become more and more complicated, and require advanced design approach, to obtain the desired level of optimization.

But I think that gold is somewhere else! If you are working with projects that can’t be calculated accurately, or the calculations take way too much effort… you will love FEA! It’s a tool that gives you the edge. Instead of guessing or wasting time on long mathematical procedures, you can do your FEA analysis. It will show you how the stress will be distributed in your model, and you won’t have to guess anymore. Not to mention other analysis that can inform you about vibrations, buckling and so much more!

FEA will also allow you to see where stresses will concentrate on your model and how badly! Try to learn the same with hand calculations!

FEA at a higher level

When you learn enough about FEA there is another level you can unlock. That is obtaining the actual failure mode of your model!

Before we get all excited here, let me tell you that this actually requires quite some learning.

You won’t do it overnight… but it’s doable for sure! I would estimate that with proper guidance and some practice you can get there within several months, maybe up to 1-2 years depending on what you want to do. Even here, there are more and less difficult things! Let me just tell you, that I learned this with trial and error (and sadly I mean it literally!). It took me 5 years to “get somewhere”. But this also shows that it’s doable even without ay external resources! Just don’t dive too deep into mathematics of this all… this won’t help you on the way!

This level is where the fun happens for sure! First of all, you are treated as an expert, and you earn like one I guess. I admit that when I was starting this was what motivated me. Funny enough it was more about the “expert” rather than “money” for me… I guess I’m weird like that!

Now I see things differently, sure being considered “an expert” and making a buck is great… but I also get to help a lot of folks! I also get to choose with whom I work (I admit that I resigned from some work as I didn’t like the people…). It’s such a great feeling to meet with people you like and help them out in their business! And there are plenty of ways you can help them! The most important are:

• Level up their products… cheaply! I just wrote that you can model an actual failure of something in FEA. Just as if you were testing a prototype… but in a fraction of costs and time required! Furthermore, with some programming, you can generate lots of various prototypes and verify all of them! If this is not a super-power I don’t know what is! It’s so cool to do a better product for companies, and see their growth and experience their gratitude. Definitely, something I love about the job!

• Get them out of trouble! I admit that I always take such jobs with a heavy heart, and I make sure this is not a “witch hunt” before I start. Let’s face it, things are being done, some aren’t great… some are straight-up bad. When something goes wrong the ability to model reality (or it’s a reasonable approximation) is super useful! You can tell what went wrong and why. This gives you a tremendous edge, and an ability to propose a good remedy for the problem. Just be aware that there are different kinds of such jobs:
  • I like when companies approach me and say “our product has issues, we don’t know why – find how to fix it” – this is an awesome job. You get to talk to people, see how the stuff intended to work and brainstorm ideas on possible fixes. I think I’m the most energetic at such meetings!
  • But there is also a darker part – especially in civil engineering where there is usually one “main” designer. And that is “find where *he* made mistakes”! While I understand the need for making fixes, I always make sure that my work won’t be used against someone directly (and luckily usually this is the case!). I learned from my professor at university while I was working on my first ever failure investigation (as a student back then). He told me: “Łukasz, never assume you would do this better than that guy. He had 2 weeks to complete the design, and we had several months and a staff of highly educated specialists to analyze it. In 2 weeks we would most likely make the same mistakes”. I guess what I’m trying to say is: don’t be an asshole. Sure, you may know more than someone else, but using this to “punish” him isn’t the best approach. This is why I want to make sure we are working toward a solution, not punishment before I start… and I would quit if it weren’t so. I don’t like to have a guilty conscious… after all as a famous XX century philosopher once said: “with great power comes great responsibility”!
• Do projects no one else dares to do! This is a fun one, connected a bit with “being an expert”. My experience is, that the more challenging the project is, the lower the competition is. Let’s face it, everyone want to do the simple work… which means they will do that work cheaper to get it. This is why the “simple” projects are so dirt cheap! If you can do the difficult things, then you are so much better off! Not to mention you get to be a hero for your Customer, as the only specialist who wanted to do the job! Again, this is a great advantage, and it comes directly from using FEA in many fields!