Pratt & Miller get ahead of the race with fe-safe™

The specialist engineering company, Pratt & Miller, has adopted fe-safe™ to deliver lightweight parts and predict fatigue life on all mission critical components in the company’s world class race cars.

With weight a primary consideration in motorsport, fe-safe™ is now used on all Pratt & Miller’s race car suspension and frame components to optimize design by reducing unnecessary material and therefore weight, while maintaining target fatigue life.

fe-safe™ determines how much the stresses must be changed in order to achieve the target design life – in this case the end of a race - clearly showing where the component is under or over-strength and most importantly for motorsport, where materials and weight can be reduced without compromising on safety.

The company switched to fe-safe™ from its previous fatigue analysis software suite primarily due to the specialist knowledge of support staff and the wide range of analysis types that are available within fe-safe™, coupled with a broad set of material properties and capabilities.

“Since our parts are optimized to the lightest possible configuration, all our primary load structures are now routinely analyzed using fe-safe™. It is critical that the design is optimized to be as light as possible while ensuring the component does not fail during a race. This is why fe-safe™ is so useful; it offers increased confidence that our designs are right first time and allows us to deliver lightweight parts to a lower target fatigue life factor than our competition.” Gary Latham , Design Office Manager, Pratt & Miller.

Pratt & Miller Engineering is a respected industry leader designing and building vehicles and subsystems in the automotive, commercial, military and aerospace industries. Today Pratt & Miller is recognized around the world as a formidable force in both motorsports and high-level engineering.