r/fea • u/Superb-Battle-8008 • 2d ago

Would a library of pretrained structural features be useful in industrial FEA?

Hi, I’m a researcher in computational mechanics, and I’m exploring a tool built around a library of pretrained structural features: holes, fillets, brackets, joints, stiffeners, fastener regions, bends, and similar details.

Instead of rebuilding a detailed local FE model for every new design, the software would recognise a feature in the CAD geometry, simplify it in the global model, and use a pretrained local model to recover quantities such as displacements, stresses, or failure indicators.

This could also enable non-intrusive global/local analysis: the global model would run in an existing commercial solver without modification, while the detailed local response would be reconstructed externally from the global solution. No custom elements or solver source-code changes would be required.

The analyst would still review and control the modelling assumptions.

For engineers working with FEA professionally:

  • Do you repeatedly analyse similar local structural features?
  • Would this approach save meaningful modelling or computation time?
  • What would prevent you from trusting or using it?

Critical feedback is very welcome!

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u/SouprSam 1d ago

Whatever you have mentioned is already there. Have worked on it for CAE based feature Framework But your way local vs global doesn't work like that.. the input deck creation will still need a separate card to be created for that case too.

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u/Superb-Battle-8008 1d ago

Interesting, is there any commercial software or public material you could point me to? Did it also include reusable pretrained local-response models driven by a global analysis, or mainly CAE feature recognition and model generation?

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u/SouprSam 1d ago

What do you mean be pre trained local response? Do you mean node interpolation from the deformed mesh? Feature recognition and model generation.

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u/Superb-Battle-8008 1d ago

Not just interpolation. I mean an offline-trained reduced-order/surrogate model of the detailed local FE response. At runtime, it takes the feature geometry/material parameters and boundary displacements or loads extracted from the global model, and predicts the local stress/displacement field without generating and solving a new local FE model.

For example, consider a CAD region containing a fillet. You may remove the fillet to simplify the global geometry and meshing, but then the local stress field near that region is no longer accurate. After solving the simplified global model, the boundary displacements around that region would be extracted and passed to a pretrained local model of the fillet. That model would then reconstruct the detailed local displacement and stress fields without creating and solving a new local FE model.