Rectangular Plate with External stiffener

Famous_Mortimer

I am needing to model a plate with fluid pressure on one side and stiffeners on the opposite side to help reduce the deflection. Tried to follow the examples. I am stuck on putting the stiffeners on the plate. I tried this one with hex8 elements.

Victor

The mesh for the stiffener has some incompatible parts where the outer edge is refined separately from the rest. I recommend deleting the whole outer row of elements because it's going to be difficult to repair.

There are two ways to have multiple parts joined together:

A. Stiffeners are separate meshes from the plate and connected with bonded contact.
This looks like what you're doing. It's easier to make but may be less accurate (needs more refinement) at the contact areas, and can sometimes cause difficulties at the edges where other constraints share the same nodes. Make the stiffeners in the same way you made the plate then add bonded contact in Loads & Constraints. Use the plate's surface as the master because it has bigger element faces.

B. Stiffeners are part of the same mesh as the plate.
Delete the existing stiffener. Then refine strips of the plate using Mesh tools -> Refine -> Custom so the element faces have the same shape as the stiffeners. Then extrude those faces using Mesh tools -> Extrude. This is similar to the tutorial 1.4 Manual Meshing.

In the end, change hex8 to hex20 because they're not appropriate for thin plates.