Welcome to MSC Fatigue.

MSC Fatigue is an advanced fatigue life estimation program for use with finite element analysis. When used early in a development design cycle it is possible to greatly enhance product life as well as reduce testing and prototype costs, thus ensuring greater speed to market. It is jointly developed in close cooperation between MSC.Software Corporation and its fatigue technology partner, nCode International, Ltd. of Sheffield, England.

The purpose of this manual is to provide you with typical example problems to demonstrate proper usage of the program. Each example is designed to show certain aspects and help to convey various principles of fatigue life estimation. The intent is to get you up to speed as quickly as possible without a steep learning curve or hours sifting through a thick manual.

This guide makes certain assumptions of the reader. The basic assumptions made are, a good knowledge of basic computer skills and terminology, and a working knowledge of finite element analysis. This manual does not deal with creation of finite element models or any aspects of actual finite element analyses except where necessary to achieve proper fatigue life estimations.

This manual assumes that the user has little or no experience with fatigue analysis in general and therefore makes every effort to explain principles of fatigue life estimation from example to example. It is not meant to be an exhaustive course on fatigue analysis however. For this we refer you to the MSC Fatigue User’s Guide and the many references sited therein.

All chapters but this one, serve as tutorials to learn the basics of MSC Fatigue.

First read this chapter in its entirety and then after a successful installation, it is highly suggested that you start at the first example and work your way sequentially. Each exercise introduces concepts that build on each other from exercise to exercise.