 In this video, I want to walk through the basic steps to performing a fatigue analysis using SOLIDWORKS and the simulation capability of that software. So in this model that I have loaded up, basically I have a 2 inch diameter rod, 10 inches long, relatively simple. I've already got the simulation tab preloaded up here, and I'm going to go ahead and start a new study. So of my options that come up here, one of them that I can choose is fatigue. However, a fatigue analysis first requires that we have a static analysis performed and the results from that available, which the fatigue analysis then uses to do its calculations. So I'm going to go ahead and start a new static analysis. And just like any sort of basic static analysis, the first thing I need to do is define a material. Now in the past, I've used alloy steel as my default. But one problem is that we need to choose a material that has SN curve data available for it. Otherwise it won't have enough information to actually conduct the analysis. Now I could define that for a material, but I'm just going to go ahead and pick a material that has SN data available. And we can find it in the SOLIDWORKS database because it'll have SN in parentheses to indicate that that data is available in the database. So I'm going to go ahead and apply this particular aluminum alloy to my part. I'm going to set up a basic study first by fixing one end, next by applying a load to the other end. And just for fun, I want to do this as a downward bending direction. So I'm going to turn on my axes, select that face, and I'm going to apply the load downward. Now I'm going to start with 10,000 Newtons as my applied load. And that should be enough to run this static analysis. I'll go ahead and run the study. And great, I've got some results. I can see here that I'm below my yield strength. So great. In static analysis I'm predicting that this isn't going to fail. Now I want to go ahead and add in my fatigue analysis. So I'm going to once again click New Study, and this time I'm going to select fatigue. It gives a few options here. This first one is just a variable amplitude sinusoidal basis like we've been talking about. And it allows me to define what I expect that to be. So I'm going to go ahead and select that one. Under fatigue I'm going to click Add a New Event. And it asks me how many cycles I want this to be. A thousand cycles is what's pre-filled in here to make it 100,000 cycles. And I want to look here just for a second at my materials information. So now that I'm in the fatigue study, I can look at my SN curve and see what that looks like and I can see the data that goes into it. I could also edit this data if I wanted to. Or I could define this information if I didn't have it previously defined. But again I chose a material that has SN data already loaded into it. So that looks fine to me. Let's take a look at my event data. Again, 100,000 loads. That still looks good. Look at our results options. That looks good. Good. Now I think we can go ahead and run the study. Alright so the result is that it's going to give me these two plots here. I have a damage plot. Basically this is on a percentage basis. So what percentage of the material within each color is damaged. And what I'm seeing here is my blue. My bottom line is 0.25. So that would be 25%. My next color up is 1.66. So that means that 166% damage. So basically means there's damage there. Maybe more interesting to look at is this life data. So this tells me that the different shaded areas would last how many cycles. And the red is pretty good. That just basically means there's no expected failure there. Where it's in blue, it's telling me that my life expected life is 6.97 times 10 to the 5th cycles. So at that point, at that number of cycles, that's when I would expect to start seeing cracks forming in that area. So in these general areas where the stress is the highest, you know, which we knew from our static analysis, we would expect to see fatigue beginning in those areas. And for this simple part, it's not terribly surprising that those locations with the higher stress would fail first in fatigue, but it's kind of useful information. I also wanted to show that we can change some of the results for this study and how this study is analyzed. So if I go under fatigue, right-click and say properties, there's a few options here. And the one I want to look at is that we can change what type of alternating stress we're using. One option would be to use equivalent stress or the von Mises stress. We can also look at how that stress is corrected on the basis of this fatigue. And the one we're most familiar with in this case is the Goodman diagram. So we can go ahead and select that as an option and click OK. And now once I've done that, I would need to rerun the study. And my results look slightly different. Come back here to fatigue. We'll notice that the numbers changed a little bit based on how we're looking at this. But you know, now we have some sense of how we could compare this to our analytical calculations when we're talking about the Goodman diagram and the equivalent stress. So this gives us some sense of how long we would expect this part to last in terms of the number of cycles. And that's pretty useful information when we're talking about a fatigue analysis. One other thing that I want to mention that we can change or edit in our setup is that we can change how the cyclic loading is applied. So under my loading and the event, I can click Edit Definition. And here's where I can change the amplitude. I can also change what style of loading it is. So fully reversed basically means that this load that I've applied to it, the 10,000 Newtons, will be applied in the downer direction that I originally specified. But then it'll transition up and point it in the other direction for that cyclic loading. And this will have then, of course, a mean stress of zero. So it's cycling between positive and negative 10,000 Newtons. If I selected zero based loading, which is the next one, basically what it would do is go up to that 10,000 Newtons and come back down to zero and cycle between 10,000 and zero. So then, of course, it would have a mean stress of 5,000 Newtons. And those are really the two most likely ones that we would choose when we're defining this analysis. So this fatigue analysis is really useful. It allows us to kind of compare these results against the fatigue stuff that we look at from an analytical standpoint using even specifically the equivalent stress, which is that von Miesi stress that we've used before, as well as using the Goodman diagram, which is the tool that we've been using so far to determine when we would find a part or determine if a part is going to fail under fatigue analysis. So this SOLIDWORK simulation-based information is good to compare against those analytical results that we have already calculated. Thanks.