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try various types of conditions FEA makes predictions, based As a result, with FEA, product
without affecting the actual on many physical effects makers can improve product
system or the process that is such as Electrostatics, Electrody- reliability, reduce the steps of
occurring – something of crit- namics, Fatigue, Fluid flow, Heat physical testing and simulate
ical importance in time-con- transfer, Mechanical stress, Me- ‘what-if’ scenarios.
strained situations or when an chanical vibration, Motion, and
actual production line cannot Plastic injection molding. FEA is Design for Reliability
be modified. commonly used before parts are The third type of simulation,
It can also be used in the plan- fabricated but can benefit exist- Design for Reliability (DfR), is a
ning process long before a real ing products for design valida- process used to ensure products
system is installed. Extensive tion purposes. and systems perform a function
analysis tools, statistics, and The mathematical principles of within a given environment
charts let users evaluate differ- FEA are also useful in other ar- over the desired lifetime. It en-
ent manufacturing scenarios eas, such as computational fluid compasses the use of an entire
and make fast, reliable deci- dynamics (CFD). set of reliability engineering
sions in the early stages of pro- FEA focuses on mechanical tools, along with the expertise
duction planning. structural assessment to find to know when and how to use Through
DES ensures a product is fit out the strength/deflection these tools. DfR, which
for manufacturing and end- of a design, while CFD focus- Typically, engineers implement is often
use. It does this by simulating es on a fluid flow assessment the DfR methodology in the part of a
factory environments such as to determine how a design beginning as an early concept, Design for
production lines, automation interacts with air, water, and but it can also be applied all the Excellence
solutions, logistic operations, or other elements. way through to product obso- program,
other manufacturing processes. Together, FEA and CFD al- lescence. Either way, the goal engineers
Some of the parameters include gorithms built into modern is to ensure customer expec- identify
yield, volumes, headcount, lay- software tools give engineers tations for reliability are met high-risk
outs, and more. This allows in- access to what are essentially with low overall lifecycle costs. areas and
dustrial engineers or process mathematical superpowers. Through DfR, which is often select tests
engineers to improve produc- To run an FEA simulation, part of a Design for Excellence for validat-
tivity, increase volumes, opti- mathematics is used to gen- program, engineers identify ing results.
mize layouts, reduce lead time, erate a mesh. This typically high-risk areas and select tests The next
and reduce work in progress. contains millions of small ele- for validating results. The next step is to
ments that make up a product’s step is to reduce or eliminate, reduce or
Finite Element Analysis overall shape. It is a highly so- potential failure modes prior to eliminate,
The second type of simulation, phisticated way of translating production release. potential
Finite Element Analysis (FEA), a 3D object into a series of DfR helps product makers meet failure
is a computational analysis mathematical points that can reliability targets, mitigate risk modes
used to predict how a product then be analyzed. from defects, optimize product prior to
or component will react in a Once the mesh is created, FEA design, reduce costs, and satisfy production
real-world environment. For analyzes each finite element, end customers. release.
example, FEA can predict if a adding up all of the individual At the core of DfR is the physics
product will break, wear out behaviors to predict the behav- of failure, which includes testing
too soon or work as designed. ior of the actual object. Because to identify issues and statistical
Engineers rely on FEA simula- the calculations are done on a analysis to determine reliability
tion to reduce the number of mesh, rather than the entirety prediction. This data can then be
physical prototypes, as well as of a physical object, it means used to recalibrate as needed pri-
run virtual experiments to op- that some approximations need or to physical prototyping.
timize their designs. to occur between the points Mean Time Between Fail-
The goal of FEA is to ensure a using different modes of ac- ures (MTBF) is an import-
product can handle various curacy. For instance, there is a ant DfR tool, which predicts
types of stress. This data is then square approximation, a poly- elapsed time between inherent
used to optimize the design of nomial approximation, and a failures of a mechanical or
a part to improve an overall discrete approximation. Each electronic system during nor-
design, avoid possible failures, of these techniques increases mal system operation. MTBF
and validate the existing geom- in complexity while increasing is calculated as the arithmetic
etry for its application. the accuracy of results. mean (average) time between

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