An Online Data Access System for a Finite Element Program

This paper describes a prototype implementation of an online data access system for a finite element analysis (FEA) program. The system incorporates a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) database as the backend to store selected analysis results; and the Internet is utilized as a data delivery vehicle. The objective is to provide the users an easy-to-use mechanism to access the needed analysis results from readily accessible sources in a ready-to-use format for further manipulation. Three key issues regarding the online engineering data access system are discussed: data modeling, data representation, and data retrieval. The online data access system gives great flexibility to the management of data in finite element programs and provides additional features to enhance the applicability of FEA software.