Darryl C. Sridhara M., Are you saying to not look at stresses at nodes (e.g.

corner or mid nodes for parabolic tetrahedrons), but rather ensure a very fine mesh at high stress points or corners -- and then plot element stress for comparison with design criteria? And, the smaller the element, the higher the element stress. For example, at the edge of a weld in high stress region, the very edge of the weld even at rounded corners will have highest stress. If that exceeds yield stress at the corner, I would imagine there would be local yielding in the area, but not necessarily failure. Of course, if the weld is badly formed, a crack should start to propagate from such location. This is a good topic for discussion across industries. Yes Darryl, that is right! I may recall that in the displacement element FE modelling, where displacements and rotations are nodal DoF, the solution to equilibrium equations gives the nodal displacements and rotations directly which are unique across all elements which share that node. The stresses are, however, calculated by using the element displacement vector (collated from the global nodal displacements) and converting it into element strain vector by multiplying it with the nodal displacement -strain transformation matrix, the [B] Matrix. For linear (i.e. constant stress) elements the [B] matrix being constant would be same at all points within an element, whereas for parabolic elements with mid-side nodes [B] matrix is linearly location-dependent and is calculated at the desired point of stress recovery. It has been established that Gauss integration points are the best sampling points to extract element stress values being most accurate there. The parabolic elements would enable one to use lesser number of elements in the FE model since the polynomial displacement expansion within an element would be quadratic. There are, however, parabolic elements where the nodal DoF have not only displacements but also first derivatives of u- and v-displacements as nodal DoF, where solution of equilibrium equations directly gives the nodal displacement derivatives, unique across all elements which share that node. The nodal strains and hence unique nodal stresses can then be calculated directly, since nodal strains are but linear combination of displacement gradients. I am not sure whether such elements are available in contemporary SW packages, but we use to write our own codes for such elements. But one needs to be cautious in using these elements in application of boundary conditions, since they involve quantities representative of strains. For stress recovery at high stress gradient regions, like what you have referred, we could carry out a local stress analysis by deploying local fine grid model or even a local three-D model in a multi-step approach, which I have extensively used in the projects I have led. Here, we recover the displacements in a normal (relatively course) FE model, and identify the region for local stress analysis. Next, we deploy a very fine mesh in this local region identified, and enforce the displacements at the nodes on the boundary of this local mesh from those obtained with the course mesh. At the newly-added nodes on the boundary of the fine mesh, we linearly interpolate the displacements from the course-mesh nodal values between which these fine-mesh nodes lie. We solve this fine-mesh model as an independent problem with the enforced boundary displacements as the only load. If we recover the elemental stresses from this fine-mesh solution, they would be very accurate with the local stress-raiser effects captured. I can cite an example of a wing stress problem I solved where, while the course mesh for the complete wing was around 60,000 DoF, the fine-mesh model to recover the stress distribution in the landing gear cut-out region, which was relatively a small region compared to complete wing, had 150,000 DoF. This local analysis captured the stress distribution near the cut-out boundary very accurately. As you have rightly noted, the peak stress value at the stress concentration boundary, however, would have crossed the material yield strength, and hence the linear stress analysis of the local mesh would not give the correct stress values at these locations. There are two solutions to this problem as noted in my second comment due to the space limitation to continue here. One can apply local plasticity corrections to the local mesh results using, f or e.g., Neuber approach, described in NACA TNs. From this approach one can calculate the nominal stress to failure (i.e. the

far-field (sub-yield) stress which drives the peak stress at the stress concentration boundary to just yield stress value), and can get the correct stress concentration factor. Alternatively, for ductile materials with large plastic strain at ultimate stress, typical of up to 20% for AlCu alloys used in aircraft industry, one can carry out an elasto-plastic stress analysis of the local model and trace the load-stress history at the peak stress location up to the material ultimate strength. If the first-level local mesh is unwieldy for the elasto-plastic analysis, one can consider building the second-level local mesh over a small region of interest, and carry out the elasto-plastic analysis with boundary displacements enforced from the first-level local mesh results. In fact, in the very critical wing stress problem referred earlier, I deployed 3-D elements in the second-level fine mesh where 2D to 3-D transition elements of MSC/NASTRAN were used between the boundary 2-D elements and internal 3-D elements. The transition elements enabled the application of boundary displacements from the first-level 2-D model, and carry out local three-dimensional elasto-plastic analysis. With this modelling I could satisfactorily establish the safety of the wing up to 1.8 times the DLL, and the same was demonstrated during the ultimate static load test carried out later. I may note that the peak stress value had reached 90% of the ultimate strength, and had 8% plastic strain! I wrote this long reply in my fervor to share my experience and that it may help the user community at large.