NEW! in Simulation 2011 – 2D Simplification

If you haven’t tried this, you should!  2D simplification study for Simulation Professional.
It will save you a lot of time to conduct detailed analysis on your model.

Let’s use a bolt and nut example:

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To create a 2D simplification study, go to create a study, as usual.  Then, you will see under “static”, “thermal”, and “nonlinear”, you can use 2D simplification.  In our case, let’s select nonlinear type.

In the next step, you can select the type of 2D simplification: “plane stress”, “plane strain”, and “axis-symmetric”.  Our model belongs to axis-symmetric.  Simply select it and pick a plane which slice the model through the centre, and include the axis.

We end up with 2D representation of the model.

Add contact sets, fixtures, and loads to the model.

Apply mesh.  I added some mesh control at the location where they contact.

Run the analysis and here is the plot.  The solver took less than a minute to finish.  If I run the study using the original 3D geometry (with same mesh sizes), it may take half an hour, or more to run.

Finally, you can also show 3D representation: