fe-safe

Traditional methods are highly sensitive to mesh size; if you refine your mesh at the weld toe, the stress singularity causes the predicted life to plummet, forcing you to "tune" the mesh to match tests. Verity (the Battelle Structural Stress Method) is mesh-insensitive. It calculates structural stress based on nodal forces rather than surface stresses, allowing you to get accurate, consistent life predictions even with coarse meshes, eliminating user subjectivity.

Yes. Unlike codes that try to force fit metal fatigue theories onto rubber, fe-safe/Rubber leverages the proprietary technology of Endurica. It accounts for unique elastomeric behaviors such as finite strains (large stretching), the Mullins effect (stress softening), and strain crystallization, providing the only commercially available critical plane solution for rubber.

fe-safe supports both. Stress life (S-N) is typically used for high-cycle fatigue (HCF) where loads are low and deformation is elastic. Strain life (e-N) is used for low-cycle fatigue (LCF) where local plastic deformation occurs at stress concentrations.

No. While fe-safe has the deepest integration with Abaqus (reading ODB files directly), it is solver-neutral. It accepts results from ANSYS (.rst), MSC Nastran (.op2), and other major solvers.

Yes, through its integration with SIMULIA Tosca, you can run a shape optimization that will reshape component surfaces, reducing local stresses and increasing durability until the target is achieved (as long as your prescribed constraints allow it).

Through rainflow counting and the critical plane method. Complexity in loading conditions mainly arises due to 1. variable amplitude loading and 2. non-proportionality between the direct and shear stresses. Rainflow counting handles variable amplitude loading, while critical plane analysis handles non-proportionality.

Rainflow counting is an industry standard method to accurately calculate fatigue cycles in a variable amplitude signal. Critical plane analysis resolves the strains onto a number of planes, calculates the damage on each plane, and reports the damage on the worst plane as the fatigue life.

Yes. fe-safe includes advanced frequency-domain methods to handle random vibration fatigue. Unlike simple tools that struggle with random inputs, fe-safe can use PSD data directly and combine it with critical plane analysis. This allows for accurate life prediction of components subjected to stochastic loading, such as vehicle suspension systems on rough roads or aerospace components under aerodynamic buffeting.

Yes. The recently introduced D _TMF technology can be used for localized or widespread plasticity and creep. It models the effects of temperature on fatigue properties, such as: the impact of the phasing between the temperature and stress/strain history; creep and its interaction with fatigue; and oxidation and its interaction with fatigue.

fe-safe is part of the SIMULIA Unified Licensing system (often referred to as "Extended Packaging"). It runs using the same Tokens that power Abaqus, Isight, and Tosca.

• For Managers: If you already have a pool of SIMULIA tokens for Abaqus, your team may already have access to fe-safe without a separate purchase.
• For Analysts: This allows you to scale up parallel processing (using more cores) during peak project times by drawing from the shared token pool.

fe-safe is highly parallelized. Because it performs calculations at every node of the model, performance scales well with multi-core CPUs. We recommend a workstation with a high core count and fast RAM.

Yes. We offer specialized training courses ranging from "Introduction to fe-safe" to advanced topics like "Weld Fatigue with Verity" and "Elastomer Fatigue." Our Application Engineers can also help you benchmark the software against your current physical test data.

Absolutely. fe-safe allows you to generate a "warranty curve" (probability of survival). By inputting the statistical variability of your material properties and the variability of customer usage profiles, the software predicts the percentage of parts expected to fail at specific service intervals. This gives engineering managers a direct link between simulation data and financial risk.

fe-safe is designed for enterprise-scale simulation. It utilizes multi-threaded parallel processing to analyze models with millions of nodes efficiently. Additionally, it employs intelligent nodal elimination algorithms to automatically skip non-damaging areas, focusing computational power only on "hot spots" to drastically reduce runtime without sacrificing accuracy.

Yes. fe-safe is fully compatible with SIMULIA Isight. You can create a "closed-loop" optimization workflow where Isight modifies parameters (like geometry or thickness), automatically updates the FEA, runs the fe-safe fatigue calculation, and iterates until the target design life is achieved. This removes manual bottlenecks and ensures optimal component sizing.

Yes. For organizations with legacy data or specialized internal methods, fe-safe supports user-defined algorithms. You can script your own failure criteria to run within the fe-safe interface, allowing you to leverage the software's powerful pre- and post-processing while maintaining your proprietary intellectual property.