Blog posts

Each year companies spend millions of dollars for developing new products with high quality and reliability. Highly reliable products require longer test times to verify, and usually takes a few iteration of design-test-fix cycle. Development time can be minimized by (1) doing accelerated testing (ALT) and (2) reducing the design-test-fix cycle by developing methods to predict and test for reliability in simulation environment. Finite element modeling and analysis provides an excellent alternative in evaluating designs to improve on reliability.

Paper transport is one of the areas under media handling methods where papers are transported by rollers through different path ways. The challenge in media handling is to transport the paper smoothly with out jam or in-plane deviation (paper skew). The smooth flow of paper is influenced by grade of paper, complexity of flow path, roller speed, roller pre-loads and significantly the roller material. It is also costly and difficult to develop a physical flow path testing.

With the trend towards miniaturization and multi-functionality in products such as mobile electronic devices, miniature IC packaging such as fine pitch Ball Grid Array (BGA) package and Chip Size Package (CSP) are increasingly being used. However, the inherent vulnerability of these miniature IC packagings has brought along new reliability problems. Among them, the drop/impact robustness is the most challenging in terms of testing and designing.

A printer chassis provides an important function of locating and securing the relative position of all the sub-systems that makeup a printer. The customer location could be thousands of miles away from the factory and many modes of transportation are required from ship, train, trucks, forklift, to pushing across corridors, stairs and elevators. The transportation loads are the most sever the printer would see in its life time. These include impacts on all sides at 3 MPH to an 8 inch vertical drop.

Random response analysis is a linear approach, while most real life random vibrations involve nonlinear components. It is challenge to analyze a nonlinear system subjected to random vibration. This paper presents an Abaqus FEA approach on the fatigue life calculation of an automobile assembly with rubber isolators subjected to random vibration. Random loading is categorized using Power Spectral Density (PSD). An equivalent dynamic analysis or a random response analysis was used to obtain the maximum stress level and location from random vibration.

Consumers demand smaller electronics devices with more features and capabilities. Making devices smaller provides challenges to engineers to maintain the acoustic performances as enclosed acoustic volume sizes are reduced. This paper discusses the requirements for coupled

structural-acoustic simulation and demonstrates the application of this technology to cell-phone

CAE applications in dealing with multiphysics problems have been drawing much attention in product development in recent years. In particular, structure-fluid interaction (FSI) problems are of major concern. In this article, a numerical simulation on air squeeze-film damping which is important in MEMS design is presented. The study employs Abaqus and STAR-CD to perform a structure-fluid co-simulation. The squeeze-film damping phenomenon of a simple plate structure is demonstrated and its mechanism investigated.

In the UK, conventional fossil fired plant is operated flexibly, some has now operated in

For high strength carbon fiber reinforced polymers, the design criteria are often specified by the compression strength of the composite materials component. This is due to the fact that the compression strength of unidirectional composites is as low as 50 to 60 percent of the tensile strength. One important compressive failure mode in composite is kink-band formation which for a great deal is governed by the waviness of the fibers and the yielding properties of the matrix material.

Analysis methodologies developed for evaluating three threaded and coupled connectors quantitatively are presented. Two new non-dimensional parameters for assessing the seal leakage and load shoulder separation are introduced for the purpose. Stress Amplification Factor (SAF), defined in API Specification 16R, is scrutinized for what type of stress is to be used and which reference point the alternating stress is measured from. As a result of it, loading sequence Mean Tension with Two Alternating Moments (MT2AM) is proposed for SAF calculation.