Hi SimScalers,
Here are some of the new and improved features that have been added to the platform last month. Enjoy!
Elastic Support
With the latest SimScale updates we enabled Elastic Support, a constraint boundary condition that allows you to add an elastic foundation to a part of your model without the need to add a domain representation like a spring or an elastic material layer to your setup. It is defined by a stiffness parameter and reacts to tension and compression.
Applications
The application below shows the stress analysis of a pneumatic actuator consisting of a piston, a spring and an elastomer diaphragm.
The results are shown both for an analysis involving the complete assembly as well as a second setup where the spring has been replaced by an elastic support boundary condition with the corresponding stiffness.
Using the elastic support, the mesh size and computation time have been considerably reduced as the spring does not need to be meshed and the cyclic symmetry of the remaining assembly allows one to investigate a subset of the model. You can find the public project here.
Suppressing rigid body motions
The elastic support can also be used to suppress undesired rigid body motions especially in nonlinear static analyses where inertia effects are disregarded and under-constrained systems are likely to diverge. This can be easily accomplished by adding virtual soft springs to the setup via elastic support.
The picture above shows a metal stamping process. Here is the public project.
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