ME 5139: ANSYS Contact Tutorial (Lab #9a)

Determine the deflection and stresses in both pieces of sheet metal:

3 in
2 in
0.25 in
5 lb
1 in

0.75 in

Thickness: 0.02 in
4 in Material: steel

Lab #9: Part A: Complete the following tutorial, submitting a plot of the deformed shape and a
contour plot of X-component of stress with the correct applied displacement of 0.43 in. Part B:
Near the end of the tutorial, several techniques are illustrated for plotting how stress varies with
position and time. Choose ONE of these to plot and submit with your Lab.

PREPROCESSING:
1. Preferences→Structural

2. Element type: Shell281

3. Material: Steel

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 4. Create a shell section and input a thickness of 0.02 in

0.02

5. Create the following keypoints and lines (the numbering does not matter):

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 6. Use Modeling→Operate→Extrude→Lines→Along Lines. Select the lines in the XY
plane, then click OK, then select line in z-direction:

7. Mesh all of the areas with 0.25-in elements:

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 8. Boundary conditions: Set All DOF=0 on the left end of each part to cantilever the
parts. You will have more than one line on the ends because of how we made the
parts, click through until you see the line with dashes corresponding to the elements.

9. Contact simulations tend to converge better when you apply a displacement instead
of a force, so I will apply an initial guess for the displacement on the line where the
distributed load is applied:

10.Preprocessor→Modeling→Create→Contact Pair to open the Contact Manager:

11.Click on the upper left icon to open the Contact Wizard.

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 12. Click on “Pick Target” and select the lower part, then click “Next >”:

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 13.Click on “Pick Contact” and select the upper three areas. Then click “Next >”:

14.Leave the default settings on this screen, then click on “Optional settings”:

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 15.Change the “Normal Penalty Stiffness” from the default of 1.0 to a smaller value—
0.01 works well—then click “OK”, and “Create >”:

This window appears, indicating the contact pair has been created. Don’t click Finish just
yet.

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 16. The plot shows the outward normals. We need to double-check that they are
pointing toward each other.

17. Switching to a front view, it appears they are pointing away from each other,
instead of toward each other:

18.To switch the normal, use the “Switch Normals on Elements button”, then use “Pick
All” to select all of the elements (If only one of your parts had the normal pointing
in the wrong direction, you could use the box function to pick the elements that need
to have their normal flipped):

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 19.They should now all be pointing toward each other:

20. For contact analysis, even if the deflections are expected to be small, we still need to
turn on Non-Linear Geometry: If this menu option does not appear, first click on
“Unabridged Menu”

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 21. Now that we are doing nonlinear analysis, ANSYS is going to take several substeps
to complete the simulation (i.e. it will displace the top part a little bit and solve,
displace it a little farther and solve, etc. until the simulation is completed.) We can
change the settings in ANSYS so that it will store all of this intermediate data so we
can view it later. Do this using Sol’n Controls:

This allows you to view results at many points during the simulation:

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SOLVING:
22. Solve→Current LS

POSTPROCESSING:
23. The resulting displaced structure:

We only guessed at the correct displacement to apply, so we need to see how much force corresponds to
the displacement we applied (our target was 5 lb.)

24.First, get a listing of the DOF constraints applied to all nodes in the model (use
List→Loads→DOF Constraints→on all Nodes):

Nodes 299, 309-316 are the nodes of interest.

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 25. Next, go to List Results→Reaction Solu to determine the force required to displace
the structure:

Summing the relevant reaction forces, we get a total force of -6.07 lb.

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 26.Try again with a smaller applied displacement of 0.4 in, the reaction forces are now:

And the total force to displace the part is 4.46 lb.

27.With an applied displacement of 0.43 in, the reaction force is now 4.93 lb, close
enough to 5 lb.

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 28. The final displaced structure:

29. X-component of stress:

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 30. Plot of Nodal Solution→Contact→Contact Status lets you see which elements are in
contact and which are nearly contacting

31.You can also get a plot of contract pressure:

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PART B: Advanced Plotting Techniques—choose one to submit with your Lab.

32.Sometimes, it is helpful to plot how a quantity varies with position across a part. A
brute force way to do this is to plot the results, then use the query button in results
viewer.

When you click on a location, it says there are 3 values at this location, as you toggle
through, you will find one is large and positive, one is zero, and the other is large and
negative. It is giving you the stress values at the top, centroid, and bottom of the shell.

33.Another way to obtain how stress or strain varies across the part is to define a path.
First, use Read Results to read the last set of results. Then, go to General
Postprocessor→Path Operations→Define Path →By Nodes

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 34.In this case, the path is along a straight line at the left end of the part, so you can
simply select the nodes at the endpoints of the path where you want to obtain
information:

35.Give your path a name:

36.This window pops up:

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 37. Map onto Path lets you select the items you want to obtain along your path.
Type in a Label and select X-Stress:

38.Before you graph the results, select Plot Path Item→Path Range to specify the x-axis
variable to use. XG, YG, and ZG are the x,y,z coordinates. S is the distance. Use
either ZG or S, since our path is along the Z-axis (XG or YG would give a straight
vertical line, STRESSX gives a straight 45-degree line)

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 39. Select Plot Path Item→On Graph and select the variable you just saved:

40.Resulting Graph:

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 41. List Path Items will give a listing of the data along the path. Note that there are far
more than 9 lines here. ANSYS uses linear interpolation between the data at nodes.
You can select File→Save As to save this data for import into Matlab or Excel.

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 42.Using Excel, when opening the .lis file, select Delimited, Next, and select Space as the
Delimiter, then click Finish.

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 43.Then, graph the data:

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 44.I created another path called CTRLINE. Because the part bends as you move left to
right across it, you can’t create this path by simply selecting the end points

45.Instead, you have to select every node along the path, in the correct order for this
path:

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 46. Here is the plot of X-Stress along the path CTRLINE. Note the x-axis is now X-
position:

47.If we want to plot how stress at one location varies over time, we use the Time-
History Postprocessor in ANSYS:

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 48.Click on the Green + sign to add a new variable, select the quantity you want to plot
then click OK:

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 49.There will be two elements at any location you pick with the mouse—choose the one
with the lower node number (the one with the higher node number is the contact
element that was created when you made your contact pair):

50.When you click OK, ANSYS will ask you to pick a node for the data. Just pick any
of the nodes attached to your element:

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 51.The stress at the location you selected now appears in the Time History Window.
Click on the graph icon to plot the data:

52.The stress starts at zero and increases linearly until the end of the simulation:

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 53. Selecting an element on the lower part instead gives a more interesting plot:

54.The stress in this element stays zero until the beams make contact, then increases in
magnitude until the end of the simulation:

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