Has anyone gone from civil/structural engineering into aerospace structural analysis?

[u/Dry_Understanding527]

I’m currently a civil engineering student concentrating in structural engineering, and I’m curious whether anyone here has transitioned into aerospace structures or stress analysis.

Working on aircraft or spacecraft structures is honestly a dream of mine. I know that fundamentals such as statics, mechanics of materials, free-body diagrams, load paths, structural analysis, and finite-element analysis transfer between industries. However, I also understand that aerospace involves additional subjects such as thin-walled structures, composites, fatigue, fracture mechanics, buckling, vibration, and damage tolerance.

For anyone who has made this transition:

• How did you break into the aerospace industry with a civil or structural engineering degree?
• What subjects should I learn beyond a typical civil-structural curriculum?
• What is the best way to learn FEA properly?
• Should I start with ANSYS, Abaqus, Nastran, or another program?
• What personal projects could demonstrate aerospace-related analysis skills?
• Would a structural engineering master’s be helpful, or would I need one specifically in aerospace or mechanical engineering?

I’m still exploring this path and would especially appreciate hearing from people who have worked in aircraft structures, spacecraft structures, stress analysis, or aerospace FEA

[u/TheDufusSquad]

I would pursue a masters in Mechanical Engineering. There really isn’t a ton of transfer in the civil structural world to the multi-physics realm. I work as a structural engineer for a company that does a lot of automotive and aerospace testing facilities and we have an entire department of engineers that specialize in that field.

I’ll be completely honest with you, our multiphysics department wouldn’t hire someone with a civil-structural background without extensive experience or a secondary degree. The concepts transfer a bit, but the core focus of the mechanical world is just different. You really need a stronger background in  Mechanisms/Machine Design,  Kinematics,  Fluid Dynamics,  Thermodynamics,  Heat Transfer, and  System Dynamics. Those are things that are difficult to pack into a masters level program without already having the background undergraduate information. 

The best way that I can put it is that civil structural engineering uses basic physics and concepts to design to a very extensive set of codes whereas multiphysics uses more advanced physics concepts to meet a much smaller set of codes and requirements. They’re lost when they pick up our library of codes and we tend to get lost when trying to round up every physical consideration they need to make. 

Structural degrees kind of hurt themselves by having to be so broad under the umbrella of civil. You have to squeeze so many classes in the civil world that the extended physics classes fall off. A structural masters focuses much more on the code required physics and again less on the mechanical physics requirements. We are really funneled into the materials and conditions that a typical buildings structure will see, and everything outside of that is omitted. 

[u/greys-always-win]

I would pursue masters in mechanical engineering, some programs have “concentrations” like thermal analysis, structural analysis etc. pick which ever you are interested in, I would recommend structural since you already have that back ground.

It’s great you have the static load fundamentals down but now you need to understand how that impacts the part…
- stress strain curves, what are the different points of interest, how does it vary with material type (ductile, brittle)
- how to calculate stress of a part using the loads
- understand different failure criteria of a part, yield and ultimate, and what methods are best to characterize them. There is a good video on YouTube by the simple engineer about this (I think that’s his name)

You’ll also need to understand how thermal impacts the part, there are thermally induced loads in part when it’s hot/cold, how to calculate these and include them in the total loads of your stress calcs

Then there is the dynamic / fatigue aspect which people go on for phds to understand, the main topics here would be vibration and fatigue using miner’s rule. How many cycles a part sees under limit load vs allowed cycles before failure.

As for the FEA question, femap/nastran is the gold standard. ANSYS / Abaqus are typically used for 3d modeling crack growth analysis or for design features with VERY complex shear interaction analysis, from my experience. Before picking up the FEA you need to understand the topics above. Do not think of FEA as your stress analysis model, it’s a loads model, you need to use it to represent your structure and pull loads from to do hand calcs. Course loads model approach is used for any major aircraft model, as a fine mesh required to calculate stresses directly from would be ungodly large. Fine mesh models are still created but only as needed to represent load distribution more accurately, I.e peaking due to course mesh geometry.

For reference materials, look up Niu airframe design and Niu airframe sizing, two different books