Component-Wise Meshing Approach and Evaluation of Bonding Strategy on the Interface of Components for Assembled Finite Element Analysis of Structures

Abstract

The finite elements are extensively utilized to solve various problems in engineering fields with the growth of computing technologies. However, there is a lack of methodology for analyses of huge assembled structures. The mechanics on the interface of each components, for instance, contact, bolt joint and welding in assembly is a key issue for important huge structure such as nuclear power plants. On the other hand, it is well known that as finite element models become large and complex, construction of detailed mesh becomes a bottleneck in the CAE procedures. To solve these problems, the authors would like to introduce component-wise meshing approach and bonding strategy on the interface of components. In order to assemble component-wise meshes, the penalty method is introduced not only to constrain the displacements, but also to introduce classical spring connection on the joint interface, although penalty method is claimed that it is not suitable for iterative solver. In this paper, the convergence performance of an iterative solver with penalty method is investigated and the detailed component-wise distributed computation scheme is described with numerical examples.

An extensible framework for smart engineering simulation software: its architecture, implementation and applications

“…With a full access to the geometric entities and the meshes, some boundary conditions, especially those prone to errors such as the bolt connections or the interactions between the parts of a complex assembly [11], can be defined automatically by following prescribed rules. The materials properties of grouped meshes and some other supplementary information such as the thicknesses of shell meshes can be assigned automatically as well.…”

“…In recent years, many industries are seeking even smarter simulation tools to automatize the tedious modeling work which are prone to errors, such as parametrizing commonly used components and meshes, updating the the definition of groups of elements from the CAD data to apply boundary conditions, defining the complex interaction between components in huge assembled structures and so on [9][10][11]. Although it is quite challenging to develop these smarter simulation softwares considering the interoperation between CAD modeling and subsequent discretization and calculation, a framework of a general-purpose simulation software and an access to the core functions of the framework (for example, manipulation of the geometric data and the mesh data, supervision of a computation task) would facilitate the implementation of the chaining and the coupling between the different modules [12].…”