Limitations of symmetry in FE modeling: A comparison of fem and air-coupled resonance imaging

It has long been an accepted practice to use symmetry in Finite Element Modeling. Whenever modeling a large structure, we turn to symmetry in order to significantly reduce the model size and computation time. But is symmetry always the solution to long computation times, and is it always accurate? This study is aimed at modeling a whole ceramic tile and several possible symmetric models under several different loading cases and comparing them to each other and Air-Coupled Ultrasonic scans to determine if the Finite Element Models can accurately predict the vibrational resonance patterns. The reason for the accuracy or inaccuracy will also be examined. The understanding of the limitations of using symmetry to model large structures will be very useful in all future modeling.