I am have finished my chassis design on paper and need to move it to a CAD to FEA/stress analyze it. I would like to purchase someones backup copy or slightly older version of Autodesk Inventor, Solidworks or SolidEdge. I am not doing the bearshare or kazaa thing. Cant afford the $,$$$ they want for a new copy. Please email me with anything that you may have.
I bought Alibre (www.alibre.com) some months ago. I paid 1400 Euro for the most extensive version and am happy with it. You can download the full
software for free from their site to try it out.
Have no experience with other cad software so cannot comment on its relative performance. Alibre themselves quite simply claim to be a cheaper
alternative to Solidworks.
The FEA tool that comes with Alibre (Algor) however is only for parts, not for assemblies. A frame is something that you can create as one a part with
some creativity so should not be a problem. An upgrade to the full FEA functionality however will cost me more than 5000us$ and I don't want to
spend that kind of money.
Am very happy with alibre customer service. Have desktop and a laptop and Alibre doesn't have any problems giving me multiple keys for one
licence. So I can install it on multiple computers.
Hope the info helps. If there are other uses who have experience with both Solidworks and Alibre I am interested in their opinions. I also didn't
want to go illegal and Solidworks was simply too expensive for me. But am curious if that was a wrong type of saving.
Rgrds,
Mies.
Pointless using FEA unless you know what you are doing with it, unless you really understand the types of constraints loads and elements to use, the results you get will have no more value than random numbers picked from the phone book.
For the user who doesn't have access to software other ways then I would highly recommend Rhino at
US$1K it's the best value for money out there and is written by Autodesk dissidents so has an Autocad sort of feel which may or may not interest
you.
To do stress analysis you do not need any of these tools though as there are good free linear stress analysis tools available. Personally I use
Framework and other people on the forum have used a thing called GRAPE.
All of these packages can give you silly results though, you have to understand the principles enough so that 1. you can ask the right question of the
system and 2. you can recognize when its giving you garbage back.
One of the hardest parts with all of this is getting sensible load values to put into your models and what those should be is a combination of what
you're going to use it (the vehicle) for and research you will need to do to satisfy yourself that you understand the problem.
For 2D CAD its hard to go past SolidEdge's drafting environment as it's Free!
[Edited on 5/3/07 by Doug68]
[Edited on 5/3/07 by Doug68]
Thanks for the info. Rhino is cool but very artsy. $1,000 is still steep. I downloaded solidworks 2D and it works well for what it is except I would still like to stress it.
I've used SolidEdge for my design but I still can't stress it in SolidEdge as I don't have access to the full version of FEMAP.
Without paying megabucks (or going to KAAZA) you are not going to get what you want.
You can however, do what you're asking for with 2 or 3 tools as described previously.
Thats about it I'm afraid.
I don't know id autocad would work for your purposes, but Bricscad is perfect clone, and is much less expensive.
we have it on our secondary systems in the engineering office I work at.
quote:
Originally posted by britishtrident
Pointless using FEA unless you know what you are doing with it, unless you really understand the types of constraints loads and elements to use, the results you get will have no more value than random numbers picked from the phone book.