Femap High Tech and Electronics
Fatigue analysis for the rest of us
Femap’s API enabled efficient integration of stress analysis and fatigue life prediction
F AT I G U E W I Z A R D LT D.
Siemens PLM Software
Business initiatives
New product development
Business challenges
Make fatigue analysis accessible
to a larger segment of the
engineering community
Create an intuitive program
that requires no additional
training
Keys to success
Developers’ strong background
in FEA
Integration with leading FEA
pre and post-processor
Easy-to-use API
Results
An intuitive, affordable option
for fatigue analysis
Seamless integration with stress
analysis software
One customer’s use of Femap
paid for the software in
six months
www.siemens.com/plm
Durability by design
FatigueWizard Ltd. was launched in
1996 to provide the engineering
community with a better option for
evaluating fatigue life. Traditionally,
fatigue analysis software has been very
expensive and difficult to use, restricting
it to the province of “fatigue gurus,”
even though fatigue failures are a
serious design concern.
“With the widespread use of FEA it is
rare now to see static failures due to
instant overload,” explains Julian Holt,
FatigueWizard co-founder. “It is more
likely that failure will occur because of
repeated loading over time. Estimates
vary, but it is accepted that between
60 to 90 percent of engineering failures now occur because of some form of fatigue failure.”
Holt, along with FatigueWizard cofounder Mark Swindell, have performed finite element analysis
(FEA) and durability analysis for more than 30 years. Being “fatigue gurus” themselves, Holt and
Swindell decided to expand the accessibility of fatigue analysis by creating software that the
average engineer could use to perform sophisticated and accurate fatigue life predictions. “Our
aim is to remove the misunderstanding that fatigue life calculation is the privilege of the few,” Holt
adds. “We believe that it should be and can be carried out by any CAE engineer.”
Integrated with Femap
The program they created (also called FatigueWizard) is much more sophisticated than hand
calculations but easier to perform. It was designed to be used as a routine step after running a
stress analysis. For this reason, FatigueWizard is tightly integrated with existing FEA software such
as the Femap® solution from Siemens PLM Software, which is the founders’ preferred FEA pre and
post-processor. “We use Femap for all of our consulting work,” Holts adds. “It’s superior for the
type of work we do, which is currently a lot of modeling where we’re working with surface
models of thin-walled structures. Femap is particularly good at handling that type of data.”

Solutions/Services
Femap
www.siemens.com/plm/femap
Client’s primary business
FatigueWizard provides an
innovative tool for calculating
fatigue life from finite
element stresses.
www.femap-fatigue.com
Client location
Loughborough
UK
“I’ve been doing FEA for 20
years and have used all the
high-end programs. Femap is
brilliant. It’s a very high-end
system and very cost-
competitive considering what
it can do.”
Julian Holt
Co-founder
FatigueWizard Ltd.
Femap High Tech and Electronics
The FatigueWizard program launches from
within Femap (users see a button on the Femap
screen that says “FatigueWizard”). The Femap
data is converted to FatigueWizard data, the
fatigue analysis runs, and the results are
converted back to Femap and displayed on the
Femap screen. All this back-and-forth between
the two programs is transparent to the user, of
course. Integrating FatigueWizard with Femap
was a straight-forward endeavor, says Holt,
thanks to Femap’s application programming
interface (API). “Femap has a good API. It’s easy
to use,” he notes.
Not for specialists only
One of the most important requirements in the on-going development of FatigueWizard is that it is
intuitive to use. “What we want is for someone who is skilled at standard linear static analysis to be
able to use FatigueWizard without any training. It has to be totally intuitive,” says Holt. Another
requirement is a reasonable price. “We want FatigueWizard to be affordable for the one-man
consultancy,” he adds.
In this respect, the integration with Femap is a nice fit, since ease of use and affordability are also
characteristics of the Femap program. In fact, these are two of the main reasons why Holt and Swindell
use Femap on the consulting side of their business. “After switching to Femap we realized we were
able to work faster,” Holt says. “One of our main clients also switched to Femap and has noticed the
same thing. They tell us Femap paid for itself in just six months by letting them get more work done in
a given period of time.”
As a software developer, one of the things Holt appreciates about Femap is the development team
behind the program. “It’s like with us and FatigueWizard,” he explains. “Femap is obviously written by
people who know and use FEA. With some other systems, you get the feeling the developers are
software people who’ve done a little FEA. Femap’s developers really know the field.
“I’ve been doing FEA for 20 years and have used all the high-end programs,” Holt concludes,“Femap is
brilliant. It’s a very high-end system and very cost-competitive considering what it can do.”
Contact
Siemens PLM Software
Americas 800 807 2200
Europe 44 (0) 1202 243455
Asia-Pacific 852 2230 3308
www.siemens.com/plm
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