ANSYS - Beam and Shell Elements (Uni-body chassis)

Owned by Jason He
Last updated: Mar 03, 2019

This guide will show you how to model beam (i.e. steel beams) and shell elements (i.e. structural composites) together to be ready for simulations.

In this guide, our beam elements will be the steel chassis of MS14 and our shell elements will be the composite catamaran of MS14.

  1. Before you begin, prepare your model in Solidworks assembly with the steel chassis and composite catamaran put together. Ensure that there are no gaps in between surfaces in the assembly.
  2. Open up ANSYS
  3. Drag an ACP (Pre) Analysis System onto the workbench
  4. Right click on Geometry and import your assembly file
  5. Edit the Geometry in SpaceClaim
  6. First, you need to convert the solid steel tubes into beam elements
    1. Select all of the solids on the left
    2. Go to Prepare and click Extract
  7. IF YOU HAVE SQUARE TUBING: make sure that your cross section does not have rounded corners. Make a new hollow square cross section using the SpaceClaim template with your dimensions.
  8. Delete any weird beam elements that look like they shouldn't belong
  9. Then, you need to connect all of the beam elements to the surfaces of the catamaran. You need to do this so that later on in Mechanical, the computer can detect all of the connections you need to make in you model.
    1. Go to Assembly and select the Move tool
    2. Click on a beam element, then the Up To button, then on a surface that you would like to connect the beam to
    3. If the Up To tool does not work (i.e. it has trouble with curved surfaces), then manually pull the beam to place onto the surface. It does not have to be exactly on the surface, as long as it is pretty damn close.
  10. Go to Repair>Solidify>Stitch and select all of your surface bodies to stitch together any loose surfaces into one
  11. Select all of your beam elements, right click and then "Move to a new component"
  12. In the properties of the new component with the beams, under Analysis>Share Topology, set it to Share
  13. If you already have a file with your impact object(s), then import it using this
    2. Alternatively, you can create impact objects in Spaceclaim.
  14. Exit out of of Spaceclaim and finalize the Setup for ACP (Pre) → TUTORIAL: ANSYS - ACP (Pre)