Setting up SW model for ANSYS

[malis]

I'm fairly new to ANSYS and me and a few collegues are discussing proper modeling. We are using SolidWorks for our CAD Program and interface with ANSYS.

The question is basically if you have an assembly that has a hole (say 2.6") in it and a boss (say 2.5" O.D.) gets welded into that hole. Can you solve the Analysis with the GAP or do you have to physically make the parts touch in SW before running the simulation. The Boss receives a very high load and therefore critical to the design.

Thanks

Jeff

 

[Stringmaker]

Jeff, you can solve the analysis either way, with touching surfaces or not. Best bet is to model surfaces as touching though. As long as when you setup the analysis you place contact elements on the appropriate surfaces of the hole and boss, and the specified pinball radius (distance which contact elements detect a target surface) is large enough you shouldn't have too much trouble establishing contact. Do yourself a favor and sit down for a couple hours and dig into the contact section within the Ansys documentation. It's very informative and will give you a good basis in understanding how contact functions within Ansys. Another option you have is to use constraint equations between the two surfaces if your analysis is well within the linear regime.

Good luck,
-Brian

 

[Stringmaker]

Just another thought...but are you sure that you really want to model the hole and the boss without any sort of "filler" inbetween? I'd say the best bet would be to model three regions, the base which contains the hole, the protrusion which fits into the hole, and the weld which fills in the hole itself. So in essence you would have three volumes.

 

[malis]

Thanks brian, but you must be talking about Classic ANSYS. For clarifaction we are using ANSYS Workbench.

 

[Stringmaker]

Workbench and Ansys work exactly the same from an analysis level standpoint however the ways which that information is input by the user are pretty different for each program. So I'd take a look at the contact section in the WB documentation in order to understand what how to control the parameters which may be especially important for your particular situation.

Good luck!