Stuck? 
support@mecway.com
support@mecway.com
Mecway
FEA
strain plot
when working with composite materials, strain is a useful failure criteria as stress is calculated on total thickness and to calculate ply stress you'd need the stack. Plotting strains in element ans /or material coordinate system would be really helpful.
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Comments
1 turn on the labs features: Tools -> Options -> Labs Note the warning that appears.
Then check:
Tools -> Labs -> Output laminate layer stress
Tools -> Labs -> Output strain and strain energy density on solid elements
Then solve a model.
Anyway, I'll test the lam stress option
I'd really like to plot strains on shells, so I duplicated my shells and assigned them a very thin thicknsess and a youngs modulus of 1. The idea was to plot the stresses, which would be equal to the strain, for this component.
However, it seems that when allocating the stiffnesses matrix, only the thin element is used, resulting a very much too weak structure.
Is there a convenient way to avoid/correct this phenomena?
/Johan
If you have two elements sharing the same set of nodes, then they should behave as you'd expect, with the combined stiffness of both of them. Perhaps they were actually using different nodes, so only the soft elements deformed, leaving the real ones behind?
Here's an example of two shell elements using your strain trick. It gives the correct strain reported as StressUU = 0.0004 Pa which is consistent with a displacement of 0.002m on the 5m long object. One difficulty is that node averaging combines the stresses from both elements into a meaningless average, so just look at the element values.
Do you prefer strains as components in element coordinates or some kind of summary value like von Mises?
Also, have you looked at the new Tsai-Wu failure criterion in v4? It checks each layer and shows the smallest factor of safety.