I have analyzed the fatigue life of a bolted joint in FE-SAFE, but it looks FE-SAFE is unable to show the most critical plane orientation in the place of crack initiation. Is anyone here has experience with how to enable this feature?
I have not used fe-safe for many years, so I cannot give a clear answer.
But, I use a similar software (femfat), and there I cannot plot, in the gui, the critical plane orientation, but if I select the node I am interested in, and make a small group of the elements surrounding it, and run the fatigue calculation for that selected node, I can see the critical plane direction in the message file. Perhaps you can do something similar in fe-safe?
Update: I must correct myself regarding plotting in femfat. I looked through the parameters to save on the postprocessing file, and I can indeed choose to save the critical plane directions. I haven't done that before.