I’ve gotten interested in designing bike frames, and I’d like to be able to run structural analysis on them.
The Karamba videos I’ve seen make it seem like it might be overkill for this purpose, but is it?
And is there any other structural analysis plug in I should counsider?
TopoOpt if you have a CUDA capable card in other words Nvidia. You’ll be getting the frame out of the box.
The frames I want don’t exist out of the box.
It was an expression, see topological optimization is basically a simulation of forces on a 3d grid (you would have to set the loads and forces such as the load of who rides the bike, gravity and such, the place where forces are distributed like the wheels), when the specifics of each set of parameters are set, the loads will take a path, where the path is there should be more material (think of it like a river flowing down) and where there are no or little there should be no or less material. The results are very organic and visually appealing.
Oh, now I see.
Just to help you with your English expressions, you mean the resulting design would be “outside of the box” of conventional bike design. “Out of the box” expression is different, generally meaning exactly how it came from the factory. So “out of the box” and “outside the box” expressions have nearly the opposite meaning.
Thats why Max replied the way he did, he and I and likely most thought you were saying the opposite of your intent.
and an example of applying it to a bike frame:
Yes I now, I meant using topological optimization you will get the design result straight out of the algorithm itself. But yeah it could be consifered out of the box too if you will.
Aha yes, this comment has clarity that the initial comment was lacking. Cheers.
A structural analysis plug-in by itself is only part of what is needed to analyze a bike frame or any other structure. Equally important are the load cases which wll be analyzed. The simple “static” case as describe in the link in Daniel Piker’s post above will be much less severe than the worst case loads in practice.
Aha. OK. This all makes sense now.
By “out of the box” I thought you meant “you should buy a frame that is already on the market”.
Does the mean I have more computation to worry about than the plug in is capable of, or does this mean I need to do research about what typical load cases are used when analyzing bike frames?
The way I see it is that each bike manufacturer will likely have their own standards, and even those will vary depending upon whether the bike is used for beach cruising or xc or enduro or downhill racing or some other expected use.
In other words you will want to apply a FOS (factor of safety), which is a multiplier, which takes into account how important some factors are, such as cost of failure and importance of minimized mass and/or cost.
These ultimately are judgements made by senior engineers, which are educated guesses based on the application.
For example based upon my experience, if someone is using a chain for pulling a load, the engineer will apply a FOS based upon the load, which will likely cause the chain to not fail, say maybe +25%. However, if the chain is used for overhead lifting, due to the increased danger, then the FOS would be higher if for overhead lifting, say 5:1, because failure could be so much more costly.
On the other hand, if it’s for spacecraft components, the cost of getting any given mass into orbit is highly more expensive, but also the cost of failure also far more expensive, and so there would be a different FOS, determined by the judgement of senior engineering staff, likely well under 5:1.
Often this would be inferred by whatever examples that one would have the opportunity to learn from. Such as if you were designing spacecraft components and you were fortunate enough to have some design examples from NASA, then you might infer that they use a specific FOS in that example. Here they tend to take even more factors into play, such as how likely the actual material is as strong as the nominal published material ratings, which are in fact not uniform, meaning a given piece of material (say aluminum plate) may be rated for a nominal strength, but in fact maybe 5 out of 100 may be weaker, so the senior engineer may dictate an increased FOS based on the possibility of the component being made of the 5th percentile of potential material strength.
Ultimately this is a major challenge of engineering, determining appropriate FOSes based upon experience, assumptions, and calculations.
Please forgive if I’m kind of all over the place here, been watching lots of football today and drinking appropriate amounts of fermented frosty beverages 
Go Tampa Brady! 
This isn’t all over the place. Very coherent and useful introduction to a concept. Thank you.