SSA Blog

This blog post was originally going to be about the fact that Robert Hooke knew that engineering systems were really non-linear, coupled with a slightly amateurish attempt to say that he’d have quite liked a non-linear FEA code. But when I was looking for a decent version of the picture I thought showed this, I found one with the graphs actually labeled, and there was no evidence that he knew about non-linearity. That was the end of the original blog post. The end of the original blog post, but the beginning of a search for what Hooke had actually said on the matter. After not very long I found, for the princely sum of nine dollars, a downloadable copy of Hooke's original paper on his law of elasticity “De Potentia Restitutiva”, or “Of spring”.

So the first of the “serious” blogs. FEA and non- specialist designers. If you’d been to any NAFEMS events in the '90’s the expression “more heat than light” would spring to mind. I can’t remember where, or which NAFEMS AGM it was exactly, but I do remember Ken Short doing the Mechanica pitch. Anyway, somebody stood up after I gave my FEA for designers talk and shouted “I don’t know how you can sleep at night..” Plenty of other things have kept me up over the last 20 years but selling FEA code to designers hasn’t been one of them.