FEM AND FVM

APPLICATION IN AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING

Lab Report
Practical #2

Objective:
To conduct a structural analysis on Aluminium strap( I Beam Structure )
having thickness of 6mm and supporting a load of 1800 N on its centre.

Submitted By: Course Teacher:

Mujtaba Sheikh Dr. Faraz Akber
AU-19013
PHASES OF PROCEDURE:
There are the three phases to complete this practical which are given below:
1. Pre-processing stage.
2. Solution phase.
3. Post processing.

Step #01: Title

In this step, title of the practical will be assigned as “Mujtaba AU-19013 Aluminum Strap”.

Step #02: Modelling

In this step, Rectangle of area 150x80 mm with center (0,0) is constructed.
Pre-Processor  Modelling  Create Areas  Rectangle  By Ctr, Corner

Now the second step follows the creation of two identical rectangles by using the rectangle by corner
command
Pre-Processor  Modelling  Create Areas  Rectangle  By Corners
The final step follows the subtraction of the following two identical rectangles using the Operate option
Pre-Processor  Modelling  Operate Booleans  Areas
The dialog box will be prompted, the first selection is to be done using the area from which it is going to be
subtracted and in the second dialog box we’ll select the areas needed to be subtract. After performing the
operation, we are left with an I beam

Step #03; Defining Attributes and Mesh Size

Now we’ll define the element for the beam, for the sake of this problem a 4 Node Quad 182 to get accurate
results. This can be done using going to Element Type Edit/Add/Delete and selecting the element.After
that we’ll go to options and select plane stress with thickness to add a 6mm thickness by going into Real
Constants option.

Now for the problem, the selected material in Aluminum therefore we’ll go to
Material Props  Material Models . Now going into Structural Linear Elastic and feeding in the
values of EX 70,000 Pa and PRXY 0.33

Final step in this process will include the defining the mesh size. This can be first by using defining the
mesh size using
Meshing  Size Cntrls  Manual Size and defining the element length size to 20, this can be reduced for a
finer mesh but this is suitable for the nature of the problem we are solving. The mesh will look like this

Step #04; Assigning Constraints and Solution and Analysis

We’ll start off by starting a new analysis and choosing static. Now in the second step we are going to fix the
upper side of the beam by
Apply  Structural  Displacement and selecting all the DOF on the upper side of the beam as 0
Now we’ll give it a force since force is focused we can use pressure option to convert this point load into
UDL by
Apply  Structural  Pressure. It is important to note that 1800 N is the point force then by diving it
from the width we’ll get our distributed loading value. Negative sign indicates the force is acting downwards

Now by going into Solution  Solve Current LS. This will solve our problem and promt the command
window saying “Solution is Done”
Step #05 Results and General Post Processing
Now we can view the results of our choice analyze the results and find out if the beam is
suitable for the particular design load
1. Deformation shows satisfactory results as the beam is not subjecting to critical
deformation and is therefore very safe to say that the beam will not fracture.

2. By a nodal solution of the von mises stress, the maximum stresses are shown is around 136 MPA.
Where as aluminum has an allowable stresses of around 276 MPA. It is also very important to note
that the critical red region are very small and only around the corners which we have suspected
otherwise too by looking at the problem only that it will create a stress in the corners of the beam.
 3. Stress intensity results also shows that stress is uniform and even around the edges.

Conclusion
All the results shown here in the analysis only indicate one thing, this beam is designed to
bear more load than defined in the problem, even the lower beam shows the blue region. In
other words if the beam needs to be optimized it can be made even shorter significantly by
reducing it’s height and even by reducing the dimension of the four corners.