Can MATLAB/Simulink perform high-level stress analysis of mechanical assemblies?

I apologize in advance if this question lacks clarity because I'm not even entirely sure what my desired solution looks like. To provide some background, I am trying to develop a tool to improve student intuition about where mechanical assemblies will fail. Many engineering students may learn how to plug in the right numbers for FEA and then just look for the red spots on the heat map, but they often lack the intuition to predict how/where/why mechanical systems will fail.

I want to take a mechanical assembly as input (e.g. a SimMechanics model) along with loading conditions, and produce the most likely point of failure (as well as an explanation?). I'm looking for something more complex than "this part can be approximated as a beam in bending and so it will fail here" and less complex than a full FEA simulation.

Any thoughts? What are MATLAB/Simulink's capabilities with regard to stress analysis?

Answer 1

[Steve Miller]

Simscape Multibody can predict motion of a dynamic system and calculate the forces that joints will experience. You could also the effect of bodies bending using the File Exchange Submission Flexible Body Models in Simscape Multibody. However, for stress, strain, and more detailed analysis within a part, you should look at Partial Differential Equation Toolbox.

--Steve