Before a product ever goes to market, companies must understand how their products will behave during and beyond their expected use cycle. Building a brand perception of product quality relies on consistently reliable products. Additionally, high development costs and expensive warranty claims can be mitigated by integrating fatigue simulation into the product development process. There are many tools on the market to simulate the durability and fatigue life of products, but what sets some solutions apart?

For me, there are three key factors in establishing a successful fatigue simulation process.

1. The software must be easy to use. Not every engineer needs to run fatigue analysis every day, so a steep learning curve is an impediment to productivity. Intuitive workflows are a must to produce trusted simulation results.
 2. Fatigue simulation must fit into your existing development process. Upending your development process to incorporate a new tool can have hugely negative effects on your productivity. The right solution should seamlessly fit into your simulation toolchain.
 3. The software you choose must be robust. It needs to offer a broad range of loading conditions in order to accurately predict how your product will perform under extreme real-world conditions.
 
Altair has made these factors the bedrock of the newly released fatigue analysis solution, Altair HyperLifeTM. Available in the recently released Altair HyperWorksTM 2019, HyperLife enables customers to quickly understand potential durability issues through an easy-to-learn solution for fatigue life under static and transient loading.

Since a wide variety of users need access to fatigue analysis, from test engineers, to design engineers as well as traditional CAE users, ease of use is an absolute must. Guided solver-neutral workflows walk users through the simulation process for a wide range of industrial applications. HyperLife also works with all major finite element analysis (FEA) tools, reading results files and recognizing geometry features including welds, which means it can be easily adopted no matter what other software tools you currently use in your product development.

Simulation is all about identifying and correcting potential issues early in the development process. Where physical testing can often take months, fatigue simulation can be done in a matter of hours, allowing you to evaluate damage and cycles to failure, faster and earlier, to ensure durability targets are hit without time-consuming and expensive redesigns.

The HyperLife workflow is familiar to anybody with durability testing or simulation experience. Choose a fatigue approach (Stress Life, Strain Life, Factor of Safety or Weld Fatigue), then assign materials to your parts from the comprehensive embedded database. Select cyclic load histories to create durability events using the mapping tool and then run the evaluation. HyperLife reports back damage, number of cycles to failure and other essential information.

Fatigue simulation enables you to differentiate your products through quality and beat competitors to market with quicker engineering decisions. I recommend checking out HyperLife!