Math in FEA – do you really need it?

I never hid with my beliefs about math in FEA. But I figured I will ask around, just to make sure I’m not missing something : )

So today you get a chance to learn more about the subject! And it won’t be only about my opinion on the matter but also what Tony Abbey thinks about it!

I think it’s a great watch, especially if you are considering (or already struggling with) learning math concepts behind FEA!

Nice links

• Test your FEA skills here!
• Tony’s website

Main Takeaways

• “FEA world” should be divided into two parts when considering this problem: you are either an FEA mechanic or an FEA driver
• If you intend to code your own solver (aka “the FEA mechanic”) then, by all means, you need to know all of the math. If you succeed let me know, so I will envy you your skill set a bit ; )
• If you want to design stuff with FEA (aka “the FEA driver”) you don’t really need all the maths – you just need the basic understanding of how things work. Far more important in this case is the “engineering judgment” and skills related to outcome estimation. Those are usually difficult from the engineering standpoint, but no complex math is usually involved.
• Both Tony and I believe that you can be good at practical FEA design without knowing how most of the algorithms work : )
• Oh, and BTW… as far as I managed to check the “typical” breaking distance at 50mph is around 5 London buses (including “thinking distance”). You can read more here, but the typical length of the London bus must be verified separately (it’s around 10m as Google suggests).

Want to learn more about FEA?

This is great! I have an online course that goes really deep into Finite Element Analysis… and you can get a free lesson from it by signing up below this post!