At that point they should start looking for a adequately-qualified FE consultant who socializes in pressure vessels and the ASME Code.

A good analyst will be able to answer all of your questions thoroughly and make you feel very comfortable with their analysis - regardless of the program that they use Chances are pretty good that if they can't answer the above questions (plus your own) then the analysis and subsequent report is worthless. AND, don't take 'it's the program default' as an answer - that's a complete cop-out and shows a dangerous lack of engineering judgement on their part. Your best friend in evaluating 3rd-party FEAs is your engineering judgement and your ability to ask as many questions as you like. Also, ask a lot of 'why' questions - why did you choose to perform the analysis this way - why did you choose this mesh density - etc. Ask them what the discretization error is in the stress analysis, and whether or not they performed a sensitivity analysis on the error to determine how much the error would affect the fatigue life. Ask them how they incorporated the temperature-dependent material properties. Ask them what the discretization error in the thermal calculations is (assuming they too were done using FEA). Ask them how they determined the temperature field at each step in the thermal transient. Ask questions of the vendor, including the ones you posted here.

My only suggestion is perform a rigorous evaluation, just like you would for any FE-based report. Isthill - I don't think that this is a 'support' issue - rather a question from an engineer who is reviewing a vendor's calculations.

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