What a cracking project for the youngsters to have done.
It seems likely that you will read more about this event in later months.
Seems like someone has taken an interest then. It will be interesting to know what the engineering report is afterwards.
How fast was it going?
So far we have only spoken about a static lift of a wing tip. Add in speed as well and the forces applied go through the roof.
You tend not to use FEA like that unless your doing an experiment to find out whats happening. Then you are using the data to tweek your model so you can predict whats going to happen with other loads etc. Once your into yield points and large deflections your into nonlinear FEA which was my skill set.
The linear side of things is pretty much intergrated now into all the CAD packages and will spit out some very pretty pictures. It was just changing as I was leaving engineering. I hope things have improved since then there was alot of people using it that didn't realise that von mises stress is always positive and not really a real stress and only of use for working out the failure point. Which led to some interesting designs. And they would force solutions through with "ill conditioned matrix" errors. I am sure though that the software packages have got more protective so instead of ill conditioned matrix the error is now "your boundary conditions are a pile of ****e" instead.
What are von mises stresses exactly in laymans language? - Yahoo! Answers
Most engineering is done by reference to codes and the codes will have acceptable limits and if your outside that its scrapped unless you can do a full analysis. Huge structures which are worth it then tend to get instrumented with strain gauges in high stress regions . They will then take a series of zero load readings then ramp the load up and see how the structure responds. Give it a dynamic wack to seem what its frequency responce is like. There are engineers that can tell you all sorts of things about whats going on by the structures natural frequency. Then basically they monitor it and watch for any changes.
Its actually the fun side of engineering which is quite specialised, completely different to the office code bashing side of things.
And yes thats about the sum of it in laymans terms but there are only a few structures out there that they do this for. The prime example is a nuclear reactor which they check ever 6 months or so to see whats changed. But that has alot more factors effecting the metal than just load. You have load creep, Neutron creep, thermal gradient effects and no doudt more that slip my memory (its been 20 years since I did that course at uni)