Has anyone found a concise but rigorous course (8–12 hours) that covers orthotropic modeling for hardwoods and validates mortise-and-tenon joint stiffness? I’m stress-testing a cantilevered ash chair with 18 mm tenons in Fusion 360, and I don’t trust the default material cards — looking for CE options that genuinely improve structural decisions, not just button-click tours.
Would you be open to stacking Ansys Innovation Courses on orthotropic elasticity and contact (totals about 8–10 hrs) and then building a custom ash card from the Wood Handbook while calibrating the M&T as a rotational spring from a quick bench test — treat the glue line like a spring, not a wish? One starter link: Forest Products Laboratory | US Forest Service Research and Development, and in Fusion you’ll likely need a connector/spring for joint stiffness rather than cohesive contact.
Piggybacking @levi_cla63, the biggest boost for me was modeling the glue line as a 0.2–0.3 mm cohesive layer and inverse‑calibrating G_RL/G_RT against a simple cantilever test on a sacrificial M&T, seeding orthotropic values from the Wood Handbook (https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/fplgtr/fplgtr190.pdf). For a tight 8–12 hr CE stack, Altair University’s anisotropy + contact micro-courses cover the theory you need; Fusion may cap orthotropy/cohesive options — are you willing to export the joint to a solver that supports cohesive zones?
For a tight 8–12 hrs, pair NAFEMS e‑learning “Intro to Composite Analysis” with their short “Contact in FEA” — it’s composite‑centric, but the orthotropy math maps cleanly to ash; small caveat: examples aren’t wood‑specific. Concrete step: align material axes to grain/ring directions and extract a rotational spring from the joint model to sanity‑check the chair in a quick frame calc — beats whack‑a‑mole with defaults. https://www.nafems.org/training/e-learning/ Does that work, or do you want something Autodesk‑specific?
autodeskuniversity.com Nastran orthotropic modules (about 9 hrs) map cleanly to Fusion 360; just align L‑R‑T with ash ring orientation.