The principal of CRM Engineering Services, Charles McCreary, has been a registered professional engineer for 17 years. Our structural practice has primarily involved offshore oil and gas structures.
Determining whether a part will fail, what material to specify, or ascertaining the cause of a failure is within the domain of stress analysis. Oftentimes the problem will be quite non-linear due to contacting parts in an assembly or material non-linearities such as plasticity.
When the temperature distribution or the rate of heating/cooling is important, a thermal analysis is required. Thermal analyses can be steady state, transient, or involve a conjugate computational fluid dynamics solution.
Some of the most vexing problems our clients see involve vibration. We address vibration engineering with a first principles approach - start with an easily understood model first.
Most metallic structures and assemblies are susceptible to fatigue if the vibratory load magnitude is large enough or if the number of cycles are high enough. Understanding the detailed stress distribution in a structure as well as the material characteristics is fundamental to predicting the durability of a component.