Table of Contents
- Large Deformations
- Contact
- Advanced Material Modeling
- Multi-Step Procedures
- Instability and Dynamics
- The Bottom Line
Have you ever tried to run a simulation that wouldn’t work? Certain structural problems are notoriously difficult to simulate, and without the right strategies, they can often have us bashing our heads against our desks.
In our webinar, we ran through five common challenges and how we can successfully tackle them with 3DEXPERIENCE SIMULIA cloud simulation. In some cases, you may encounter many of these challenges in one simulation, such as working with a plastic buckle or forming a superplastic box. Below is a bite-size recap of what we discussed.
1. Large Deformations
Large deformations, large rotations and other sources of geometric nonlinearity can be solved with a robust and efficient nonlinear solver that you must increment the stiffness matrix.
With 3DEXPERIENCE SIMULIA, you can use powerful Abaqus solvers to help you manage deformations with advanced settings for geometric nonlinearity, stabilization, and incrementation.
2. Contact
Because there are hundreds of locations where surfaces contact each other, contact interactions and changes during the analysis can be both tricky to specify and solve. Imagine a plastic buckle where the two pieces come together for the user to fasten the buckle. This would be a sliding contact.
Rather than selecting individual contact surfaces, general contact in 3DEXPERIENCE SIMULIA provides a way to easily define global contact properties, such as friction, allowing the solver to automatically detect contacting surfaces.
3. Advanced Material Modeling
Finding the right material modeling is important if you want to get an accurate representation of your material response in your simulation.
Using 3DEXPERIENCE SIMULIA, you can choose from many advanced material models, such as metal plasticity, hyperelastic elastomer, superelastic nitinol, foam and composites. It can even assess the damage and failure of materials.
4. Multi-Step Procedures
For some scenarios, you need to define sequential steps. Perhaps you need to apply some preload before a dynamic test, or perhaps you’re simulating a two-step-forming process with multiple tools.
Native multi-step modeling in 3DEXPERIENCE SIMULIA makes it easy to alter boundary conditions and naturally solve multiple operations.
5. Instability and Dynamics
Troubleshooting solvers with instability issues can be the most frustrating challenge to experience because many high-speed dynamic events are inherently very unstable. There isn’t much you can do if you don’t have a strategy to deal with that instability.
The Abaqus solvers in 3DEXPERIENCE SIMULIA have automatic stabilization options for minor instabilities, and we can use explicit incrementation to deal with the most extreme situations.
The Bottom Line
Most software will require a lot of computation time to solve these types of hard problems. The 3DEXPERIENCE SIMULIA cloud simulation tools provide the options and capabilities that allow you to handle complex problems without expensive hardware. The computing is on-demand and on the cloud for you to quickly access and complete your work.
Most importantly, you’ll want to choose appropriate simulation strategies and techniques for your projects.
If you have any questions or want to learn more about 3DEXPERIENCE SIMULIA, contact us at Hawk Ridge Systems.
About the Author
Terence Woo is a product manager at our Hawk Ridge Systems office in Vancouver, British Columbia. He has extensive experience with SOLIDWORKS and SIMULIA analysis tools and helped hundreds of customers solve problems across many industries. When he isn’t working on simulation models, he spends his free time skiing, golfing, rock climbing and playing hockey.
