File locations for Femdesigner products
The Femdesigner addon for Alibre is always to be found in the FEMforAD folder in the Alibre 'Addons' folder (see picture below). Do not put the downloaded zip file there; instead you must unzip FEMforAD the folder that is in the zip file and place that folder there. Do not place the FEMforAD folder inside any other folder because Alibre will not then locate the addon link file 'FEMforAD.adc' and so won't put Femdesigner on the Alibre ribbon bar. You can put the folder in any side-by-side Alibre Addons folder but it will only work in one of them. It is easy to install, move and remove and easy to replace with an upgrade. Only the Hex product now uses the Windows registry and the Windows standard installer.
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The femdesign.exe file is called when you press 'Solve' in the 'Solution' dialog box. This is the file that has the copy protection so you will only see the copy protection dialog box when you solve. The 'fem32' folder contains the older 32-bit, single-processer solver for those who didn't upgrade and this has a different license. It can be safely ignored for anyone else. If you still use the 32-bit solver then it is called up by clicking on '32-bit' in the 'Solution' dialog box.
All files for a part are kept in the 'FEMprojects' folder in your main 'documents'* folder under the folder whith the same name as your part name (see picture below for part name Load Test new). The loadcase files are identified easily as they have the loadcase name with a txt extension. This is the file that is read by the mesher and the solver. The mesh is contained in binary form (.meb) and a text form always called check.mes. The results files also have the name of the loadcase but with a .out extension. The text files can be read easily for post-processing purposes.
.The mesh is created from a step file generated from the Alibre API and then is read into the meshing program. Note that there is often a default loadcase name with the same name of the part and you can create a mesh from that file too. In that case there will be 2 loadcases in the loadcase list to select from when you next click on 'old' loadcase. Do not confuse the loadcase you just created and solved with the default loadcase which may contain nothing and then assume your work has been lost. Lastly a .api_fem file is the loadcase file in binary form for interfacing with Alibre.
If you have any issue with something not solving then the answer may be obvious in the loadcase txt file; eg you thought it was loaded because the load is in the treeview but it didn't appear in the LOADS section of the txt file and so was not read by the solver. If you contact us with a query then it helps if you attach a zip file of this part folder.
By the way, it is always sensible to create a new part (using save as..) specifically for an analysis because there will be symmetry cuts to make and unimportant parts of the model to remove before meshing. You may find you have multiple analysis models for one object; in order to analyse different parts of it more quickly than by modelling the whole thing at once.
*Apologies to those who have a different name for the 'documents' folder.