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When designing a connecting rod, one needs to pay attention to the buckling strength of the rod. The buckling strength is heavily affected by the beam section, and Johnson's buckling equation is used to estimate the buckling strength of a given beam section. This approach is acceptable if the beam section geometry is constant from the small end to the big end. But, recent expectations for light weight, low NVH, and low fuel consumption engines require optimizing the connecting rod section geometries to be progressively changing from the small end to the big end. Finite Element Analysis (FEA) is often used to evaluate the buckling strength of a rod that has complex changes in beam section. There are two primary FEA methods to do this. One is an eigenvalue method and the other is an explicit dynamic method.