Can anyone suggest any software that will calculate increment stress effects on a body ? a particular application would be calculating increment stress on gear teeth through a simulation run. Since we would have a cyclic run, if we had 2 gears, their teeth would be in contact once every revolution, and i am interested in knowing if there is a software that will keep track of the "damage" done on first contact, which would slightly change the geometry of the gear and most importantly change the way the gear responds to the same stress at future contacts.
You'll need a non-linear transient FEA capability.
I'm assuming that the gear rotational velocity is small enough where you aren't interested in inertial effects. You want to do a non-linear load that tracks loading over one or more rotational cycles.
You need to model contact and friction at the contact points. That's a challenging non-linear problem.
You'll need a mesh that's refined enough in the contact zone to resolve the surface stress you're interested in.
Small strain is sufficient as a first step. Large strains would imply that your geometry is in some trouble.
Damage implies a non-linear material model of some kind. What were you assuming? Small strain plasticity with isotropic or kinematic hardening? Or a more advanced model like Walker or Chaboche?
Do temperature effects matter to you? Must you do a heat transfer analysis as well?
Do you have a model for metallurgical effects (e.g. austenite/martensite phase changes for carbon steel)? Do you have any heat treatment or grain size data that impact your material model?
I'd recommend starting simple and modeling contact between two teeth, one stationary and another in motion.
I haven't done finite element analysis for a living in many years, but when I was a practitioner this kind of problem would be solved with something like MARC or ABAQUS. I believe ANSYS is very popular now. There are also open source finite element solvers, but I'm less familiar with those.
I'm sure you've done a Google search for something like "finite element analysis gear tooth". You're far from the first to be interested in a problem like this.