A BRIEF HISTORY OF CAD-TO-FEA DATA TRANSFER

摘要

I started doing serious finite element analysis (FEA) in the mid-1970s. CAD had not been thought of yet. I remember my skepticism when I was first shown remote text terminals linked to the mighty IBM mainframe! Drawings were produced the old-fashioned way: on drawing boards. Constructing a mesh required overlaying tracing paper onto the drawing, and penciling in nodes and elements. This was extremely tedious and error-prone. Luckily, most structures were thin skin components that could use 2D element meshing. I built some meshes to carry out damage tolerance analysis on 3D lugs, which predated the Rubik's Cube in spatial complexity.