Industry is putting increasing pressure on manufacturers to use less material to deliver lightweight but stronger components, lower warranty and recall costs and all in less time.

Many companies use advanced Finite Element Analysis to calculate design stresses, but the fatigue analysis is often still done by manually picking stress points for spreadsheet analysis. This is time-consuming and unreliable because it is easy to miss failure locations.

Component validation by fatigue testing a prototype design in the test lab is time-consuming. If the prototype fails prematurely, a costly, open-ended cycle of design-test-redesign maybe required. Project time-scales slip and delivery is late.