Our engineer left our company and I been tasked on taking over his duties in modeling. He was able to teach me how to run a few simulations such as frequency and static for vertical loads. What he wasn't able to show me is how to determine stiffness of the assembly. Can anyone walk me thru that? He did mention to determine stiffness you remove the gravity and change the load to 1 newton. I am not sure if that is only one newton per foot or one newton for the entire load. Anyway I run it again and I am not sure what to do from there. Shown below is URES: Resultant Displacement. (mm).
As you probably already guessed I am no engineer and new to Solidworks as well. We use inventor for our design work and he got Solidworks just for the simulation. Any help would be greatly appreciated
Alex,
Not to demean or discourage you but this is the very reason I do not like FEA packages like Simulation being as "user friendly" as they are. It is very easy to place constraints and loads on a component and get some very pretty and convincing pictures that have no more value than the paper they are printed on but because they are run on a "sophisticated" program and have very pretty pictures and graphs people will take the results as proof that a design will work. Then the part breaks the first week of use, or worse yet the bridge collapses on a buss load of crippled lawyer's children.
In running an analysis there are several key things to be aware of. Is your model set to have the proper material with the proper material properties? Does it have the correct thickness? Do you know how it is going to be mounted? Is it sitting on a flat surface with a force directly towards the surface? Does the mount allow it to rotate or translate in a direction? Is it a pinned or a fixed mounting, can you tell the difference? Do you have all the degrees of freedom accounted for? what about the load? Will it be centered of offset to a side? Will it be straight of at an angle, constant or cyclic? Where does the one Newton come from? Did a fig fall on it? Or is that the weight of the concrete that the block will be supporting? Why would you remove the effect of gravity? Is it standing on it's side with the desired deflection measurement to the right or is it filled with helium?
I understand you are doing your job and attempting to please the boss but does he really understand what he is asking of you? Even as engineers most of us do not receive the proper training to really understand FEA correctly. It is a specialized subject that only a few take classes in. That said, with enough training and guidance lost of people, not just engineers, are capable of learning how to run this program and with enough experience can produce accurate results. It is clear you have not had the benefit of that guidance.
Sorry for the soap box rant but your boss is placing quite a bit of responsibility on your shoulders that you have not been properly prepared for and I would hate to see you fail much like I would fail if dropped in a fourgin country asked to spell correctly.