Guess who’s back…back again. Yes, just like Slim Shady, I’m back (returned to PADT and writing Focus blogs).
So run and go tell your friends that horrible pop cultural references have returned to ANSYS blog posts. It’s been too long.
Getting back on track, the object generator debuted in R14.5 Mechanical. You can access this feature in the toolbar (image below taken from R15):
What exactly does the object generator do? Simple answer…it makes your life better. It uses named selections and a single instance of an object (joint, spring, bolt pretension, etc) and replicates it across all entities in the named selection. Let’s play around with this feature on the following (dummy) assembly:
Above is a t-pipe with three covers, one of them has bolt ‘bodies’ modeled. We’ll use fixed-fixed joints to connect the two ‘bolt-less’ bodies together, and then define bolt preloads on the bolt pattern. To get started, we need to build up the named selections.
I’m planning on defining the fixed-fixed joint between the two cylindrical surfaces:
This is a pretty simple assembly, and I could easily just manually select them all, right-mouse-click, and generate the named selection. In the real world, things aren’t always so easy, so we’ll get a little fancy. First, create a named selection of the bodies that contain faces we want to joint together:
I’ve created two named selections, called ‘joint_cover’ and ‘joint_pipe’ and utilized the ‘random colors’ option to display them in different colors. Next, I insert a named selection but set the scoping method to be ‘by worksheet’:
I’ll then use selection logic (MAPDL hipsters will recognize the logic as the xSEL commands):
Now, order is important here, as the selection logic ‘flows’ from top to bottom. First, this named selection selects the bodies contained in the existing named selection ‘joint_cover’ (note: this object MUST exist above the worksheet-created named selection in the tree). At this point in time, we have two bodies selected. Next, it converts my body selection to faces belonging to those bodies. Finally, it filters out any face that has a radius less than .05m (units are set by the ‘units’ drop-down menu, values entered in worksheet scale when units are changed). Hit ‘generate’ and you get the following:
You may need to switch to the ‘graphics’ tab (circled in red in the above image). This is great, we now have all of our faces highlighted. Next, we need to reproduce this behavior on the pipe. Rather than redo all of this work, just right-mouse-click on our new named selection and select ‘duplicate’.
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Select the duplicated named selection, and edit the first line to use a different named selection. Hit generate:
Perfect. We can go back and add/remove bodies to the existing named selections and re-generate the named selections to have it automatically re-create these named selections.
Next, we’ll create the original ‘joint’ we want to re-create across the two flanges.
After making the joint, make note of which part is the ‘reference’ and ‘mobile’. For the image above, the cover is the ‘reference’ while the pipe is the ‘mobile’. Highlight this joint and select the object generator:
If we use the object generator on a joint, it will ask us to define the named selections that contain the reference and mobile faces. From above, we know that the cover faces are contained in the ‘cover_faces’ named selection. We then duplicated that and swapped the body selection, meaning the faces for the pipe are contained in ‘cover_faces 2’ (I’m lazy and didn’t rename it…sorry). Next, we define the minimum distance between centroids. This acts as a filter for re-creating each joint. What happens when we hit ‘generate’ is it looks at the distance between the centroids of each face in the two named selections. If it finds ‘matching’ faces within that distance it creates the joint.
In the image above, if I use a distance equal to the red line, I will get incorrect joints defined. I’ll get the following (a=cover, b=pipe): 1a-1b, 1a-2b, 2a-2b, 2a-1b…
What I need to do is limit the distance to the blue line, which is big enough to find the correct pairs but filter out the wrong ones. To figure out a proper distance, you can use the ‘selection information’ window to figure out the centroid information:
Once you’re set, hit ‘generate’:
What a time to be alive! It’s always a good idea to go through joint-by-joint to make sure everything is correct…or you can always just count the number of joints created and confirm that the number is correct (I have 15 total faces in the cover_faces named selection…so I should have 15 joints…and I do).
Next, let’s look at the bolt pretension definition. We start with a named selection of the face where the bolt pretension will be applied:
Next, we create our original bolt pretension load:
I’ve setup my bolt pretension to solve for a 100N axial load in load step 1 and then lock the solved-for relative displacement in for load step 2. We select the bolt pretension in the tree, then select the object generator:
Select the named selection that contains the bolt faces, and hit generate:
This is incredibly useful for bolt pretension for two reasons. The first reason is obvious…it significantly cuts down on the amount of work you need to do for large bolt patterns. The second reason…you can only make changes to bolt pretension objects one at a time. By that, I mean you cannot multi-select all your bolt pretensions and change the load and step behavior (e.g. change load to 200N, open in load step 2, etc).
If you select all the bolt pretensions, the changes you make in the tabular data window are only applied to the first selected object. All other bolt pretensions are kept the same. So if you suddenly realize the pretension was setup incorrectly, it’s best to delete all but one of the pretension object, make the necessary changes, then duplicate it. That way you can be sure all the bolt pretensions are correct (unless you’re simulating a bolt opening up…then ignore).
One very important thing to note is that the object generator is not parametrically linked to anything. If I go back and change the number of holes/bolts/etc in my model, I may need to re-generate the duplicated joints/bolts/etc. The named selections should update just fine, assuming you didn’t open the hole up bigger than the selection tolerance. I would recommend deleting all but the original joint/bolt pretension and just re-create everything after the CAD update (this may actually speed up the CAD transfer as it’s not trying to link up incorrect entity IDs).
Hopefully this will save you some time/frustration in your next analysis. The documentation in R15 can be accessed here: help/wb_sim/ds_object_generator.html
