I am currently working on a project that involves analyzing the fatigue loading of Flyline/Zipline structures, particularly considering climatic influences such as wind and temperature. These structures are similar to rope cars and are subject to various environmental conditions, and I am interested in developing a simulation-based approach to better understand their behavior under such conditions.
I would greatly appreciate any advice, insights, or resources that the community may have regarding this topic. Specifically, I am looking for guidance on:
Methods for simulating wind effects on Flyline/Zipline structures.
Incorporating temperature variations into fatigue loading analysis.
Recommended software or tools for conducting simulations in this context.
Any relevant research papers, case studies, or practical experiences that could inform this analysis.
If anyone has expertise in this field or a related field and would be willing to share their knowledge, I would be very grateful.
Hello @prav , and thanks for reaching out to us via Forum; sounds like an exciting project! To answer your points one-by-one:
Methods for simulating wind effects on Flyline/Zipline structures: A CFD solver should be sufficiant to obtain the pressure loads on such structures. Incompressible solver type on SimScale platform can be used, for example, because wind speeds usually do not exceed incompressible regimes. In case the model is quite complex, Incompressible (LBM) solver is usually recommended, since it’s known as being quite robust and fast when it comes to large domains such as yours. It’s important to keep in mind that LBM is a solver that can be only included with a professional plan though. Please find several examples of such analysis in SimScale Public Projects library.
Incorporating temperature variations into fatigue loading analysis: To assess the loads due to temperature variations, a Thermomechanical analysis can be used on the platform. Output of these simulations will be max stresses, displacements, etc. Fatigue is usually a post-processing operation after the stresses are obtained, and there is not a direct way to compute fatigue related outputs such as number of cycles in SimScale platform yet. However, usually maximum stresses are enough to compute the number of cycles, and an equation to compute this number of cycles can be inserted by either using Field Calculator in the SimScale post-processor, or in another post-processing tool such as Paraview.
Recommended software or tools for conducting simulations in this context: I would recommend testing SimScale. Since it’s a cloud-based software you won’t need any installations or downloads. As a community user you’re free to perform up to 10 simulations. Step-by-step tutorials given in this page for structural and fluid flow simulations should be helpful to get you started.
Any relevant research papers, case studies, or practical experiences that could inform this analysis: Extensive documentation page given here will be very helpful I believe. You can also refer to previous forum posts about your requests, and also check out the existent customer stories in this page.
Overall, a standard methodology for you would be the following:
Obtaining the pressure loads on your structure by using one of the CFD solvers provided above,
Using these pressure loads and thermal loads in an FEA simulation type (Static or Thermomechanical in this case)
Assessing the stresses, and computing fatigue outputs based on these stresses with your own equations.
I hope the information above would be helpful. Please let us know if anything remains unclear, or not sure where to start. We’d be happy to guide you!
