Engineering specialist, Pratt & Miller, has adopted fe-safe™ fatigue analysis software to predict fatigue life on all mission critical components in the company’s world class race cars.

With weight a primary consideration in motorsport, fe-safe™ is now used on all Pratt & Miller’s race car suspension and frame components to optimize design by reducing unnecessary material and therefore weight, while maintaining target fatigue life.

fe-safe™ determines how much the stresses must be changed in order to achieve the target design life – in this case the end of a race - clearly showing where the component is under or over-strength and most importantly for motorsport, where materials and weight can be reduced without compromising on safety.

The company switched to fe-safe™ from its previous fatigue analysis software suite primarily due to the specialist knowledge of support staff and the wide range of analysis types that are available within fe-safe™, coupled with a broad set of material properties and capabilities.

“Since our parts are optimized to the lightest possible configuration, all our primary load structures are now routinely analyzed using fe-safe™. It is critical that the design is optimized to be as light as possible while ensuring the component does not fail during a race. This is why fe-safe™ is so useful; it offers increased confidence that our designs are right first time and allows us to deliver lightweight parts to a lower target fatigue life factor than our competition.” Gary Latham, Design Office Manager, Pratt & Miller

About Pratt & Miller
Pratt & Miller Engineering is a respected industry leader designing and building vehicles and subsystems in the automotive, commercial, military and aerospace industries. Today Pratt & Miller is recognized around the world as a formidable force in both motorsports and high-level engineering.

About Safe Technology Ltd
Safe Technology Ltd is a privately owned company dedicated solely to the development of fatigue analysis software solutions from FEA. The company’s fe-safe™ software suite and its specialist modules are used by leading blue chip companies around the world. It is sold and supported directly by offices in the UK and the USA and by a worldwide network of independent distributors.