Learning Forum

[shantashreejena97]

Hello everyone,

In my model, I have lots of beams made of aluminum alloy are jointed to each other by bolts. But during import, I have deleted all the bolts. Now I cant able to detect which type of connection and contact should I take to make these fix? Below is a part of my whole assembly to show how the beams are connected together. The holes are situated in the slot of 5mm thickness in the entire length of a beam. Can anyone help me to assign the contacts?

[peteroznewman]

Hello Shantashree,

A beam is a good way to connect two adjacent holes that normally have a bolt through them but the bolt has not been imported into the model. Under the Connections folder, Insert > Beam.  Pick the cylindrical face of the hole in the first part for the Reference side of the beam, then click on the Mobile side and pick the hole in the other part and type the Radius of the bolt.

If you have a lot of bolts you want to create beams for, you can use Named Selections for the Reference and Mobile sides of many holes, and use the Object Generator to automatically create many beams.

Regards,
Peter

[shantashreejena97]

Hi Peter,

If I use only beam connections is it able to restrict the whole three DOF or shall I use any other contact?

[peteroznewman]

Hi Shantashree, a beam connects all DOF between the two bodies. You can even apply Pretension if you want to squeeze the faces of the two bodies together, but that is not required.

[shantashreejena97]

Should I put them rigid or deformable? If rigid then why and if deformable then why?

[peteroznewman]

Deformable is generally preferred because it distributes the forces over the area and avoids stress concentrations.  Rigid would be required if there was a thin walled pipe that had a circular cross-section where you want the cross-section to remain circular under load but the deformable setting allows the cross-section to flatten into an oval.