It’s essential to manufacture and design components that are easier, stronger, and safer to use.
Since manufacturing industries and shops produce engineered components in bulk, they need to ensure the strength and safety of their materials. This is where stress engineering services play a vital role in validating these materials.
In general terms, structural analysis is the calculation of the impact caused by a load on a given structure (or) a material. It is even applicable in civil engineering where they determine a structure’s strength depending on its capability to withstand loads like buildings and bridges.
This is done to make sure that the material doesn’t experience any expensive failures. So it goes through a series of tests to finalize whether the material is too ready to sustain under certain loads and pressures.
In this article, we want to take you through a comprehensive study of structural analysis in stress engineering.
Types of Stress In a Material
Before diving straight into the technical and analysis side of stress engineering. You might already know that stress is the resistance, caused when a force is applied to a body.
We do need to understand the different types of stresses which can be observed in materials, such as:-
- Elastic Stress: When a force is applied to the material, and it results in temporary deformation. Then it’s called ‘elastic stress’.
- Plastic Stress: When deformation caused by the resistance (applied force) becomes permanent, it’s called ‘plastic stress.’
- Tensile Stress: If a force is applied to the material in the opposite direction to the resistance and it leads to tearing. Then it’s called ‘tensile stress’.
- Compressive Stress: A resistance caused due to the force which results in compression of the material. Then it’s called ‘compressive stress’.
- Shear Stress: The resistance caused at the cross-sectional point of a material when force is applied, and the deformation is opposite to the applied force. Then it’s called ‘shear stress’.
These stress definitions are essential to keep in mind during analyzing materials on the production floor. The better we understand the stress concept, the better it becomes for us to do any sort of structural analysis for different materials.
What Factors To Consider in Stress Engineering
It takes a vast amount of time and effort to understand and execute structural analysis in stress engineering. Instead of making the process of analysis more complex. We wanna shed light on a few important factors which contribute to stress engineering.
These are some of the factors to keep in mind while doing the analysis:-
Static and Dynamic Loading
Both static and dynamic loading analysis is commonly done in Finite Element Analysis (FEA). These analyses are majorly done at the design stages.
In static stress analysis, we evaluate the deformation caused by placing different loads and we make sure that no failure happens while carrying out the production process. Here the structure will be under multiple loads and conditions caused by external forces, surface loads, and body forces.
In dynamic stress analysis, we evaluate temporary load impact on the material and try to rule out the noise and vibrational issues. Since vibration testing and damage during dynamic loading can cost us a fortune. It’s better for engineers to analyze design initially. Later come up with better solutions via realistic loads and pressure.
Non-linear Materials
For a linear material, stress to strain ratio is constant (Young’s Modulus or Modulus of Elasticity). But at some point when the stress level increases and material moves to plastic regions.
Specific implications can cause the material to operate in the plastic regions. In such cases, non-linear analysis is the best technique to validate whether the design created was apt for the process. Multi-linear or bi-linear material models are used for this analysis. There are many computing resources that can help us make accurate and faster decisions.
Stress engineering services can provide realistic data regarding non-linear stress analysis using non-linear material models.
Geometry
Modeling of the parts and prototypes are essential to carry out production processes more swiftly. It’s important to avoid any improper results and sometimes geometry of materials causes:-
- Large deflections
- Rough and Frictionless contact
- Exceeding stress levels above the yield point
In short, the structural integrity of the material is not maintained. This improper material’s geometry could prove an expensive mistake.
There is a well-researched pdf by ResearchGate. They took an example of geometric modeling of the device for torsion and concluded how stress analysis was helpful in their experiment.
Why Stress Engineering is Important For Production
Stress engineering services are bound to take material through a series of analyses to validate it before passing for a round of production.
Stress analysis is essential to test the strength and safety of the structures that are designed. We wanna mention a few points on why this analysis is necessary:-
To Maintain Structural Integrity:
Since the materials are gonna experience a lot of external load and pressure, it’s essential to assess how internal stresses are distributed through the material when a force is applied.
The analysis will be done by implementing different loads on multiple pressure points. The observation of the stress and the impact caused will help us produce a reliable component.
To Save Costs:
Instead of spending money on developing a damaged (or) unreliable product. It’s safer, comfortable, and convenient to invest in pre-analysis of your design and prototypes.
Testing via analysis will cost us initially. But we could recognize the potential issues with the structure early in the design process. Thus way before the production, we would be aware of the present material limits.
As early as possible when we could rectify the limitations, it saves us a ton of money in the long-run. Our team of stress engineers in Houston Texas will also come up with advanced solutions to make materials sustain better load and pressure.
Conclusion
Stress engineering services aim to provide realistic data and observations to come with more vital, safer, and reliable engineering components.
This analysis of the structures, when applied with different loads tells us how stress is distributed internally in the material and what impact it could cause.
Many industries apply these interpretations in their design stage of the product. It gives out material limitations for each applied force. Since digital technology is helping us out with numbers, it becomes easier to observe the impact and come with a set of boundaries for each material.
Further down the line, we can implement practical solutions to improve the design and make material withstand various stresses and conditions.