An Innovative Automatic Tool for Managing the Correlation of Several FE Result Values with Corresponding Test Data

This presentation was made at the 2015 NAFEMS India Conference.

Resource Abstract

This paper presents a case study of a frequency response analysis, requiring the user to create several bode plots for phase and magnitude graph results in a commercial postprocessor to predict inertance transfer function over several nodes in the FE model. It is required to correlate these plots with test results in the form of foreign data files in ASCII format over several corresponding locations on the physical prototype. Thus the procedure needs multiple iterations to refine the FE model to establish good correlation with test data. To manage this over a huge FE model is a herculean task, if done manually as several nodes and corresponding test locations are involved. To overcome this challenge, the author hereby presents an innovative tool to perform this correlation task automatically, in addition to providing a quick graphic summary to the user to quickly pinpoint the status of correlation met. The tool makes use of Perl to that manipulates native session file formats provided by the commercial postprocessor that contains all definitions of the simulation plots and links to corresponding test data from foreign ASCII files for performing correlation automatically over a specified frequency range of interest. The tool further integrates the Postprocessor and MS Excel using VBA generating a summary report of status of correlation achieved.

The tool is highly scalable, in that, it can handle any number of nodes and loadcases and foreign test data files. It also phenomenally reduces the time and effort to track number of locations where the correlation is violated at each of the iteration of the FE model refinement. Thus the entire correlation exercise becomes highly productive and accurate.