Hi,
First post here so please bear with me.
I am trying to run a pipeline spool lift analysis in Simulation and getting strange results, well strange reaction force results.
It is a 4 point lift and I have assumed that the spoolpeice is supported half the pipe circumference between 3 o'clock and 9 o'clock and lifted vertically. The only applied load is gravity.
The issue is that the resultant force in the Y-direction is greater than the weight of the spoolpeice c/w flanges.
I am missing something?
I have attached the model and simulation result files. Please let me know if these are not required in the future.
Thanks,
Mike
I played around with your model and with mesauring the reaction force. It seems that the coarser the mesh, the more inaccurate (and higher) the reaction loads are. The error goes from ~43% with the coarse mesh to ~0.11% with the fine mesh. It's normal to see slight changes in the calculated reaction forces with an increase in the # of DOF, but I've never seen anything like this. I'm interested in finding out how SW calculates reaction forces within the software.