FEA & Simulation

No one builds a physical wellhead, bolts it up, and pressure-tests it to destruction just to find out where it would fail — and even if you did, that single test wouldn’t tell you what happens at a different temperature, a different load combination, or a slightly different wall thickness. That’s the gap Finite Element

Run a linear-elastic FEA on a pressure-containing component and it’s common to get a result that says the design fails — calculated stress above yield at a local hot spot — on a part that, in reality, has years of safe service behind it or would clearly survive a hydrotest. That’s not a wrong answer;

“Can you analyze this for us” means two different jobs depending on whether the part exists yet. Design validation checks a new design before it’s built. Re-rating (or re-qualification) checks an existing, already-proven design against a duty it wasn’t originally analyzed for. They use the same FEA tools and the same codes, but the question

You don’t need to run an FEA to know whether the one you’ve been handed is any good. You need to know what’s supposed to be in it, and what its absence means. This is written for the person on the receiving end of an analysis report — procurement, project management, a client’s engineer who