Does anyone know where I can find an understandable tutorial on how to use Inventor Stress Analysis? Autodesk Wikihelp appears to be a fruitless search.
Perhaps this will help you get started: the first link is a tutorial, the second is a brief overview of the process and the third is just a bit more information:
http://www.augi.com/library/stressed-autodesk-inventor-simulation-faq/
Good luck!
Congratulations! You’ve decided to use one of Inventor’s best features. It’s one of the few things that is truely beter about Inventor than SolidWorks.
I learned using the built in tutorials. They were quite helpful, and I beleive they come free for FRC students.
One thing to keep in mind while doing FEA is that it is more an art than a science. I’ve been doing it for at least a year, and I’m still don’t really trust my results. It takes lots of experience to set up simulations that recreate well what might happen in the real world. An expert can get results that are actually useful. A novice usually doesn’t know what to assume (forces, mesh size, what’s fixed, etc.), so they will just change their assumptions until they “confirm” what they want to see.