Continue to Site

Eng-Tips is the largest engineering community on the Internet

Intelligent Work Forums for Engineering Professionals

  • Congratulations IDS on being selected by the Eng-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

how to assign contact property to line body (beam)?

Status
Not open for further replies.

kev66

Electrical
Apr 27, 2010
14
Hi,
I am new to Ansys and I am trying to simulate pulling two curved beam, joined at one end point, straight and during the process, the beams will touch one another. I am having trouble trying to assign some kind of contact or interaction (hard contact, rough surface) so that the beams don't go through one another when touching. I read online there is a line-to-line contact element 176 and 170 but I am not sure how I can assign it in the workbench. The following is what I've done:

I am doing this in Ansys 13 workbench.
My geometry is created as follows:
1) created two 3D curves (in the xy-plane) by reading external coordinate files;
2) a single line body is created by the workbench from the two 3D curves (because they join at the origin) and assigned a rectangular cross section to the line body to make it into a beam (does this actually make the line body into a beam element or do I need to explicitly assign it somewhere)?

Model:
I could find contact setup under "connections" --> contact but that seems to require two surfaces which I cannot select from my beam formed by the line body.

I know I probably can get this done if I actually create a 3D solid and assign contacts that way but I'd like to reduce the computation load if possible.

Could someone please give some pointers on how this can be done?

Thanks.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor