Getting started

What is LoudGears

LoudGears is a structural analysis service for custom forged wheels. You load a wheel CAD file, choose the target vehicle, and get a finite-element (FEA) result for stress, displacement, and safety factor, with a clear pass or fail verdict and a PDF report.

How the system fits together

LoudGears has two parts that work together:

PartWhere it runsWhat it does
LoudGears WebYour browser, at loudgears.comAccount, projects, vehicle load cases, the solve queue, results, and PDF reports.
ForgeNodeYour Windows 11 x64 workstationReads your wheel geometry, builds the mesh, and runs the FEA solver on your GPU or CPU.

The browser talks to ForgeNode on the same workstation. Your STEP file is read by ForgeNode and never uploaded to LoudGears. The cloud stores your project details and a signed numerical summary of each result. See Data and security for exactly what is stored where.

The analysis workflow

  1. Install and activate ForgeNode on the workstation that will run the analysis. See Install ForgeNode.
  2. Create a project in the Web workspace. See Projects and revisions.
  3. Bind the vehicle loads: pick the make, model, and year range, and LoudGears supplies the load case. See Vehicle loads.
  4. Choose a route, a STEP file and the wheel material (6061-T6 aluminium or AZ80A-T6 magnesium), then Add to FEA queue. See Run an analysis.
  5. Follow the run in the Solve Queue. See Solve queue and monitoring.
  6. Read the result and its verdict. See Read a result.
  7. Export a PDF report. See Reports.

A typical run of a STEP file for a wheel of moderate complexity on a supported GPU takes 2–3 minutes, from Add to FEA queue to the verified result. IGES and X_T files first add their conversion time, and the CPU route takes longer.

What LoudGears decides for you

To keep results comparable, LoudGears manages the engineering settings that normally need an FEA specialist:

  • Mesh: both routes use a 5 mm analysis mesh with 10-node tetrahedral (Tet10) elements.
  • Material: fixed cards for forged 6061-T6 aluminium and AZ80A-T6 magnesium, each with its own pass rule.
  • Boundary conditions: production-validated presets.
  • Loads: taken from the vehicle load case you select, or from an approved manual override.

You choose the geometry, the vehicle, the material, and the route (GPU or CPU). Everything else is fixed, so two runs on the same inputs give the same answer.

Supported geometry

  • STEP (.step, .stp), one file per analysis, up to 50 MB.
  • IGES (.igs, .iges), beta, up to 50 MB, with an up-to-date ForgeNode. See Exporting IGES.
  • Parasolid X_T (.x_t, .xt), beta, up to 50 MB, with an up-to-date ForgeNode. See Exporting X_T.

Where to go next