Is it possible to mesh truss elements?

manuelz

I'm following the Truss tutorial on the Optional module of the course "A Hands-on Introduction to Engineering Simulations" of EDX

There, I saw that a simple truss structure, composed of 3 elements, was refined into 30 elements:


I tried doing the same with Mecway, but even with only a 2x refinement, I'm getting huge displacements in the blue region:


My model looks like this:



It's constrained in the bottom left corner in the x and y directions, it's constrained in the y direction in the bottom right corner and a horizontal force is being applied in the top left corner.

What am I doing wrong?

Thank you,
Manuel

Victor

The circles represent pin-joints which truss elements have at both ends, so they're free to flop all over the place. Usually, you shouldn't refine truss elements for this reason. If you really need to - eg, to capture bending of the members due to loads somewhere along their length, you can use beam elements with flexible joint on beam at each face end so it behaves like a truss member.

I don't know how that Ansys example works but perhaps it converts them to beams like this automatically?

manuelz

Thank you! At least now I know that I wasn't making a mistake.

fatigue_pro

Ansys Mechanical uses beam elements as default. You can use springs or have to switch the element properties to the old link10 element to get real truss behavior.

Perhaps the following tutorial can also help you, to learn something about beam/truss modelling in Mecway.

manuelz

Thank you for sharing that tutorial! I learned about some features of Mecway!