Dear PrePoMax team,
I am working on a FEA analysis of a transmission shaft and I would need to simulate a bearing constraint on shaft journals.
As far as I understood, PrePoMax does not manage radial constraint, which I would use to simulate bearing constraint. Am I right?
How would you approach this problem?
Thanks in advance for your help and regards,
Umberto
Nodes of solid elements don’t have rotational degrees of freedom and some workarounds are required to apply boundary conditions or loads to rotational DOFs. In PrePoMax you can use rigid body constraint and apply BCs/loads to its reference point. Like here: PrePoMax (CalculiX FEA) - Tutorial 2 - Torsion of an elliptical bar - YouTube
Local cylindrical coordinate system could also help but it’s not yet supported in PrePoMax and would require keyword edits.
Thank you very much for your help.
So, if my understanding is correct, your recommendation is to make a kinematic coupling of journal surface to an origin (bearing center) through Rigid Body & Reference point. And then, assuming the shaft direction is Z, I guess you recommend to set the reference point U1, U2, U4, U5 fixed, and U3 and U6 uncostrained. Is my understanding correct, or?
Thanks again for your support.
Regards, Umberto
Yes, you can do it this way.
Thank you very much for your hint.
I performed the calculation in this way and it worked.
Regards, Umberto