Hey guys,

I would like to shine a light on something I encountered, work done by a third party. We had some analysis done (simple static) to determine tolerable stress in a construction. (material etc in this case is not too interesting, but the interpretation of results is).

What they did was take an area in the cross section of one of the pipes to determine an 'average stress' with the probe function. While max stress goes up to 33MPa (von mises in this case, but same can be done for the normal stress with same results) in this case they take the average result in the pipe area and come up with an average of 16MPa......

I've never seen or heard this practice before.

Anyone has an idea why and how these results should be interpreted? Is this a proven method? Why not just take the maximum stress right at the point it will be most likely to fail? (If at all you want to be producing results based on a 'simple' FAE analysis, but that is another matter)