Buyers's perceptions of FEA Software:

This was lifted from the forums of eng-tips. Seems people are looking for inexpensive FEA but there is only expensive or free. Their suspicion of any inexpensive software will largely be similar to these 3 points, most of which apply to free software, rather than inexpensive software. However it's all about perception in this game. I like to imagine a budget FEA market similar to the desktop publishers or CAD market. Might be possible!
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"The main cost of a modern FEA package is split into three factors:
1) robustness of the algorithms. Everybody is able to self-program a valid FE code for solving 1-D elements in the linear domain. It's probably one of the easiest "things" to program in engineering. But when you begin to deal with non-linears, contact interactions, composite materials, multi-layer elements, birth-and-death, adaptive meshes, etc etc etc, and in addition all this "thing" must be optimized in order not to take millenia to solve, you can imagine the effort of the development people.
2) support. Have a problem with Ansys you can't get out of? No problem: apart from the fact that being one of the most known programs you can find a very huge users' comunity to help you, in "extreme" cases you have two levels of support: your reseller, and the main Company itself. You pay for it, but that makes a lot of difference wrt a "free" software (most of which is univ-born, so would you write e-mails directly to the teachers, researchers and students? Sometimes it may work, but usually...)
3) user interface. OK, this may not be a problem any more nowadays 'cause there are several pre- and post- already programmed and compiled by the "free comunity" which do a good (or at least acceptable) job.

Anyway, just because of the first two points you can not simply take a good free solver and claim that it would save the world instead of commercial packages such as Abaqus, Ansys and some others... It would save YOUR world and money UNTIL you run into one of their weaknesses (every program has some bug). Should this happen, good luck: it would be you and the program..." (plagiarised from cbrn on Eng-tips)
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I disagree with some of that but it is the public perception that counts. Someone else on the same thread said you always get what you pay for. That's utter bilge of course. You get what you set out to get, or are persuaded to get, or what your neighbour has, and much of the time you end up with an expensive pig while if you look around you can manage to find a cheap jewel*. It's the 80/20 rule again though. Only 20% of the buying public know how to buy effectively. Meantime we sellers have to deal with the other 80% by using psychology,much as i described in a previous thread, and bearing in mind the 3 points above.


*On re-reading this I find it ironic that in our world a pig, which is useful, is worth less than a jewel, which isn't. Illogical! as Spock would say. Does our monetary system revolve around the adornments we hang on our body rather than what feeds us, clothes us or heats us? Well it used to. Nowadays it revolves around oil, which does do all of that! Food for thought.

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Watts up

Help I want to name my electric car but the Tesla, the Faraday, the Ohm, the Amp and the Volt have all been taken. Watt is the only SI unit left. The Edison maybe? He never did get a unit named after him did he?

Maybe it's time to go funky and call it the Juice!

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