Steve Roensch is an engineering stress analyst with more than 25 years of professional experience in failure analysis and litigation consulting. He has analyzed hundreds of product designs and has provided expert witness services across many industries, including giving depositions and court testimony.
Mr. Roensch has provided litigation consulting in the energy, construction, industrial, transportation, commercial, utility and residential industries. He has supplied legal team technical support, and has given depositions and testified in court and arbitration hearings.
Mr. Roensch specializes in analyzing the physical stresses that arise in a product under various loading conditions, and in determining if the design is sufficient to survive such loads. He investigates product failures and accidents from a fundamental engineering perspective, often applying finite element analysis. He documents his efforts thoroughly from the start, for concise presentation to the legal team, other experts and the jury. Complex engineering principles are explained using everyday concepts that everyone can understand. Color stress plots and animations are used whenever possible to convey complicated engineering results in an easy to understand visual format.
Learn more about mechanical engineer expert witness services at www.FiniteElement.com.
The Courtroom FEA Newsletter discusses the use of Finite Element Analysis in the courtroom, and serves thousands of product liability and personal injury attorneys in 26 countries.
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Courtroom FEA: Why did it fail?
Do you have a case where a loss, injury or death was caused by something bending or breaking? Finite element analysis (FEA) can help explain why the product failed, which can often identify the responsible party.
Was the product design deficient? Was the subject part defectively manufactured? Or was the product abused by the end user? Being able to answer these questions with engineering certainty may be the difference between winning and losing your case.
The FEA results can be presented as color images and animations. As discussed in previous issues of Courtroom FEA, this makes the analysis conclusions more understandable for the jury. An accurate FEA can also be powerful leverage in reaching an advantageous settlement with your opposition.
An experienced analyst can prepare the finite element model such that it accurately predicts the part's behavior, and can ensure that the solution algorithms do not interject significant errors. Results from the less-experienced are often suspect, and identifying them as so can be a tremendous advantage in the courtroom.
FEA has internal checks that a good analyst needs to apply to verify the results. Hand calculations provide a rough estimate of the results, and the hand calculations and FEA had better match within their accuracies. If not, something is wrong with one or both of them, and the analyst had better correct that. Once they do match, hand calculations are an external check of the detailed FEA results.
Given the advantages of a carefully applied analysis, it is worth your time to consider how an experienced FEA expert can help you win your client's case.
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