I have one bolt that I need to have forces acting on each side of the bolt where the surfaces are, but I want the middle of the bolt to be a fixed support. I tried to use surfaces to apply the forces to in the areas I need the forces, when I tried to run the simulation it said there isn’t a material assigned to the surfaces. When I assigned a material to the surfaces it said “Material Steel has assignments that are sheet bodies. Please remove these assignments.”
If there is a better way to go about this type of scenario, what is it? Should I split the bolt into 3 pieces and then have the faces bonded together in simscale? I just need the forces applied where the 2 outer surfaces are but also for the bolt to be treated as one part.
I can see that you already solved the issue with the sheet bodies, which is nice.
It can work as you did, with the splitting of the bolt, but this is not necessary. You can leave the bolt complete, and use an Imprint operation to create the face for contact with the lug, splitting the outer face:
This should be better, as the stress distribution across the bolt is not affected by those bonded contacts.
Finally, I think the simulation would be better if you use a physical contact, as the faces are allowed to separate realistically. For this, you need to:
Switch to non-linear analysis.
Change the bonded contact for physical contact.
Change the constant force for a ramp (using a table).
Check out this tutorial on non-linear simulation for some guidance: