If you had a 180 degree circular channel cut on a long piece of material, how do you simulate applying pressure due to a local clamp? Lets say the piece is 1ft long, and there is 7X 3inch clamps pressing against a cable into the channel at 35MPa each. My immediate though was to apply 35MPa uniform pressure, and that get’s me some useful knowledge across the with of the channel but across the length, I have not clue how to constrain that without having the clamps and cable in place. Basically I need to constrain the pressure so that it deforms the part locally but without pushing the part into body motion. If I constrain the ends, the it will forma U shape for example, but that’s not how the clamps would work.
How is that long part with a channel supported ? If only the red supports are present and the blue “clamp” part is just pushed against the cable and channel then you could replace it with pressure loads applied to properly partitioned surfaces and simulate red supports with boundary conditions.
Of course, you can also utilize symmetry if the geometry, loads and boundary conditions are symmetric about any plane.
Ah yes. let me clarify. the blue clamp has 4 screws that provide the force to create the pressure on the cable and then onto the channel. Thus the clamp pulls on the U channel to push down on it. I have a feeling that I will have to split it in half and still model the clamp and cable to see the overall effect on the simply supported channel part.
You could try modeling the clamp as rigid (to reduce the size of the model) and simulating how it presses on a piece of cable and a channel. Then it would be interesting to compare it with a simplified model in which the clamp and the cable are replaced with pressure loads.
How do I go about making the clamp a rigid body? Any tutorials on that? Someone suggested this for another question I had, and I never did figure out how to set a body as rigid.
It’s already available in PrePoMax. Under constraints you will find rigid body. You can select the whole part to make it rigid. Just create the reference point first.
The only issue I found was that yeah the body allows body motion unless you fix it. But then if you fix it, you got double MPCs so it errors out unless you remove the notes that you will use to fix the body from the node set you created. LOL. It was a great way to learn how stuff really works though :).
