Have you ever wondered how engineers and manufacturers test the durability, strength and safety of their designs?

If you've ever watched a car commercial, you might believe engineers and designers continually destroy their products to test for strength. You might conclude manufacturers repeat this process until the design can withstand a great amount of damage and it reaches an acceptable durability. Even though it costs companies millions to test and destroy their concepts, this is really the only way to prove a product's durability, right?

The answer to that is yes and no. While engineers almost always test a product's final design by having it interact with actual physical forces, engineers and manufacturers also use computer-aided engineering software to optimize strength and durability before actually testing it. The process of using software to test how a product reacts to real-world forces is called finite element analysis (FEA).