After that, the empty project will be imported into your profile. The following picture demonstrates what should be visible after importing the tutorial project.
Figure 2: That is how your workbench should look like after hitting the ‘import tutorial into workbench’ button.
1.1 Create the Simulation
Firstly, you can create a new simulation by clicking the ‘Create Simulation’ button in the geometry dialog box.
Figure 3: Geometry dialog box.
Secondly, after clicking the button the simulation library will pop up:
Figure 4: SimScale simulation library.
We will select the ‘Static’ analysis type for this simulation.
After selecting the analysis type, the simulation tree will appear. This shows you the settings that we will need to define before starting the simulation.
Figure 5: Simulation tree.
Now, you are ready to setup the linear static analysis of the crane.
2. Simulation Settings
Before running the simulation, we will need to define important settings. These settings are:
Direction of gravity
Materials of the crane
Boundary conditions
2.1 Direction of Gravity
The magnitude and direction of gravity highly affect the result of the simulation, because the crane’s own weight is a noticeable load already. You can define the magnitude and direction of gravity by clicking the ‘Model’ in your simulation tree.
Figure 6: Gravity settings.
The magnitude of gravity is 9.81 \(m/s^2\) and the direction of gravity for this simulation will be in the negative y-direction.
2.2 Define a Material
You will also need to define the material of your crane. You can choose the material of your crane by clicking ‘Materials’ in the simulation tree which opens the SimScale material library.:
Figure 7: Material library.
For this simulation please select ‘Steel’ and confirm with ‘Apply’.
Figure 8: Steel material assigned to the crane model.
You have successfully created a new material. Now you need to assign it to a geometry, so simply click on the crane to assign it.
You can also define your own material by changing the material property. Additionally, you can give it a new name.
2.3 Assign the Boundary Conditions
Boundary conditions play a key role in simulations. They define the physical conditions, which you want to analyze your design with. In this simulation, we will apply a fixed support-, and a force boundary condition. The places where the boundary conditions are applied can be seen below:
Figure 9: Boundary conditions applied for this simulation. Compare them later to what you set up and make sure they are the same.
The next steps will show you how to assign each boundary conditions.
a. Fixed Suppot
Firstly, you can define a boundary condition by going to ‘Boundary conditions’ in your simulation tree and this will show you the list of possible boundary conditions that can be applied for a static linear simulation. This is the step where you select ‘Fixed support’ as a boundary condition.
Figure 10: Boundary condition list for linear static simulation.
After that, a dialog box of the fixed support boundary condition will show up. Here, you will only need to define where the support of the crane is located.
Figure 11: Fixed support boundary condition.
b. Force
You can follow the similar steps as before to select the Force boundary conditions.
Figure 12: Force boundary condition.
We will define our force to be -500 kN in the y-direction. Since the force is a downward force, it is negative.
Note
No changes were made for the Numerics and Result control settings for this tutorial as default settings will be sufficient.
3. Mesh
To get the mesh, we recommend using the standard algorithm, which is automated and delivers good results for the most geometries.
The only change you need to do here is enabling 2nd order elements so that you will gain more accurate results.
You can start a simulation run by going to ‘Simulation run’ in the simulation tree.
Figure 15: Steps to start a new simulation run.
After clicking, you will be shown a dialog box that shows you an estimate of the computing resource that will be spent to run your simulation. Moreover, you are also allowed to change the name of your simulation run, this can be used to differentiate each run.
Figure 16: Simulation run dialog box.
You can start the simulation run by pressing the ‘Start’ button.
5. Post-Processing
After the simulation has finished, you can access the results by clicking the ‘Post-process results’ button in the Rundialog box or by going to the ‘Solution fields’ under the simulation run.
Figure 17: Access to post-processor in SimScale
When you have been directed in the post-processor, you can start analyzing your results. For this tutorial, we will show the von Mises stress and the displacement of the crane.
5.1 Von Mises Stress
You can show the von Mises stress of the crane by going to the ‘Results’ in the post-processor and clicking the ‘Globe’ beside von Mises stress.
Figure 18: Steps to show von Mises stress.
After that, the von Mises stress of the crane is visualized.
Figure 19: von Mises stress of a crane.
5.2 Displacement
Since displacement is also important in stress analysis, we can visualize both the von Mises stress and displacement. You can do this by clicking the ‘DIS’ tab in the Results config in the post-processor and enable displacement by clicking the ‘Globe’ symbol.
Figure 20: Steps to show displacement.
Since the displacement of the crane is very small, we will need to scale the displacement to clearly visualize it. You can scale the displacement by going to ‘Dis: displacement’ under ‘Results’. Here, you can change the Scale factor of the displacement.
Figure 21: Steps to scale displacement.
For example, the picture below is a visualization of the von Mises stress and the crane is deformed by a factor of 50.
Figure 22: Visualization of von Mises stress and displacement.
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
