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.

fe-safe™ provides fatigue life evaluation for lift truck design

Sheffield: NACCO Materials Handling Group, Inc ("NMHG") has adopted fe-safe™ and the Verity® in fe-safe™ module, from Safe Technology Ltd. The software will be used to predict the durability of welded structures, castings and individual components in order to provide an understanding of fatigue life earlier in the development process.

fe-safe™ is an advanced suite of durability analysis software for Finite Element models and was chosen due to its strong technical foundation and comprehensive capabilities for identifying fatigue hotspots and predicting fatigue life. NMHG considers the Verity® structural stress method incorporated into fe-safe™ to be the most advanced weld fatigue analysis methodology currently available.

fe-safe™ and Verity® in fe-safe™ will be used by the Product Evaluation Department of NMHG’s Virtual Test Group.

About NACCO Materials Handling Group, Inc
Based in the USA, NACCO Materials Handling Group, Inc . designs, engineers, manufactures, sells, services and leases a comprehensive line of lift trucks, including warehouse trucks, counterbalanced trucks and large capacity cargo and container handling trucks, and aftermarket parts marketed globally under the Hyster® and Yale® brand names.

About Safe Technology Ltd
Based in the UK, Safe Technology Ltd is a privately owned company dedicated solely to the development and sale of the fatigue analysis software suite, fe-safe™. fe-safe™ and its specialist modules are sold and supported directly by offices in the UK and the USA and by a worldwide network of independent distributors.