12-24-2025, 06:24 PM
I'm a mechanical engineer using finite element analysis to model thermal stresses in a new composite material component for an aerospace application, but I'm getting convergence issues and unrealistic stress concentrations at the mesh boundaries. I've refined the mesh and checked my boundary conditions, but the problem persists. For experienced FEA users, what are your systematic troubleshooting steps when facing persistent convergence problems in nonlinear static structural analysis, and how do you validate that your mesh is sufficiently refined without making the solve time prohibitively long for complex geometries?