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Finite Element Analysis (FEA) has been widely implemented by the automotive industry as a productivity tool for design engineers to reduce both development time and cost. This essential work serves as a guide for FEA as a design tool and addresses the specific needs of design engineers to improve productivity. It provides a clear presentation that will help practitioners to avoid mistakes. Easy to use examples of FEA fundamentals are clearly presented that can be simply applied during the product development process. The FEA process is fully explored in this fundamental and practical approach that includes: Understanding FEA basics Commonly used modeling techniques Application of FEA in the design process Fundamental errors and their effect on the quality of results Hands-on simple and informative exercises This indispensable guide provides design engineers with proven methods to analyze their own work while it is still in the form of easily modifiable CAD models.

The successful use of analysis by design engineers during the product development process strongly depends on the choice of those analysis tools that offer easy integration with CAD and provide reliable results, while not requiring an in-depth expertise in analysis. The intention of this paper is to assist in choosing those tools that are best suited for use by design engineers. We start with a summary of differences between analysis performed by a design engineer and by an analyst. Next, we discuss advantages and disadvantages of commercially available analysis methods, from the point of view of design engineers. In conclusion we recommend that design engineers use either the p method of the Finite Element Analysis or the Precise Solids Method and offer hints as to which one is advantageous depending on particular analysis problem.