Hello All,

I have been working on a heavy support plate that anchors a cable and am currently trying to validate hand calculations with the FEA (or vice versa). I approached the problem in several different ways since all seem to have issues. I will try to elaborate as much as I can. Any answers or tips would be much appreciated

The plate is a rectangular piece of aluminum with large fillets at the top and a hole for the pin near the top.

The bottom face was given fixed geometry

First I applied a bearing load to the pin in the upward direction, however it made the entire part torque out of axis which struck me as odd, is there something involving the bearing load that would cause that? How would I properly set it up? Do I need the pin modeled as well?

I then created the steel pin part that goes in the hole and tried it again, both with the pin deformable and rigid and also made it smaller and created a pin connector. This correlated well to the hand calcs when it came to shear, however it was quite higher in stress (in direction of force, in this case Y) and also had a strange distribution. I thought that the stress would be higher at the smallest cross sectional area in-plane, in this case to the immediate sides of the center of the pin/hole. However the SOLIDWORKS analysis shows the highest stress at the bottom of the area radiating downward:

I have some thoughts as to why this might happen, but I want to make sure that the model is set up correctly before I try to revolutionize pin theory or if this is just how it is when things are no longer idealized in mathematical models.

FYI: The bearing version had a more sensible stress distribution, but a massively greater stress and the weird out of plane bending mentioned earlier in the post.

Thanks again in advance.

Best Regards,

Brendan