FEWELD RAINFLOW CYCLE COUNTING AND DAMAGE ACCUMULATION

Cycle counting and damage accumulation is a feature that will be included in the next release of FEWeld.  There are some user interface and documentation tasks that have yet to be completed.  We use it here in consulting work currently.

The basic process is that data for loading degrees of freedom is generated from physical tests of other simulations.  The fea model to be analyzed is built and unit loads are applied for each degree of freedom of loading as a separate load case.  The nodal stresses for each unit load are read from the FEA model by FEWeld. Then the time series is applied so that each node has it's time series individually generated for each stress component (transverse, inplane shear, out of plane shear) as the sum of the stress states for each unit load case multiplied by eaches time history factor at over the time series,  the peaks are accumulated through rainflow cycle counting, and the damage for each cycle is accumulated for each of the summed stress components.


Time Series Data Segement









The FEWeld Definitions, Interface, and Results









And, detail output for each damage component at any or all nodes can be generated: