Hi

There has been quite a bit of chat on here regarding chassis structural analysis, most of which has gone completely over my head
Can anyone point me in the direction of a good basic book to read and possibly some cheap/free software?

Many Thanks Mick

The best place to start with analysis is with the easy stuff, so get something like an "A" level maths book or simple mateials book, maybe "applied mathematics" by bostock and chandler or "mechanics of engineering materials" by benham and crawford.

Form these you will be able to get to grips with where loads go in beams, frames and panels by basic statics and trigonometry.

Moving onward a little, there are many excellent stress analysis reference books, the most common is "roarkes formulas for stress and strain". Having calculated the loads in your structures this allows you to consider the strength by selecting appropriate formulas from the reference tables.

The finite element analysis approach is basically a comuter aided approach to computing the same calculations. When structures become complex the mathematics become quite cumbersome, the software will generate the loading distributions for you.

The key advantage for fe is the ability to provide stiffness and deflection predictions quickly.

I know there are a number of shareware fea packages avaliable but have no experience of htem so hopefully somebody else can help here.

The key thing to stress analysis is understanding what you need to calculate and roughly whta numbers you are going to expect. FEA and other computanional methods can then be applied for speed and ease.

Never forget that an fe prediction will be a perfect answer to the asked question, so if the question is wrong...............

A good starter to get you head around things would be to try and calculate the strength of a wishbone or roll over bar subjected to a maximum applied load.

I hope this is of some use,
Cheers mate.