The FEA capabilities in Inventor Simulation are great for determining design stress, deflection, and safety factor under static conditions, but in the real world temperature often plays a significant factor. Maybe you even have components of differing materials that must hold tolerances through a temperature variation. Autodesk Algor can give you the kind of digital simulation results you need to work within those constraints.
Here are two new video examples of Algor in use to solve these common thermal problems:
Thermal Expansion Video HERE.
Thermal Stress Video HERE.
Contributed by Ben of the Tata Technologies CAD Geeks
Check out these three webcast to help you go further with your digital prototyping ....
12/9 - at 11 am est - Better and Better Webinar Series - Introduction to Inventor Tooling
12/10 - at 11 am est - Better and Better Webinar Series - Introduction to Moldflow Advisor
12/11 - at 11 am est - Better and Better Webinar Series - Design Automation with Autodesk Inventor
One of the typical pain points in doing an FEA on long and thin models is that most automatic meshers will not create a mesh that will yield accurate results. A good example of this might be with trusses or similar structures.Autodesk Algor includes a couple types of elements that can help us solve these situations. One is truss elements and the other is beam elements. These element types let us define the properties of the structural members in the design while only using line geometry to define the form.
Contributed by Ben of the Tata Technologies CAD Geeks.
In the Inventor Simulation Suite and Inventor Professional, the FEA solver can determine if a design will fail due to a high stress in the model, but this might only be half the story. If the model is in compression and is a thin or elongated structure, the model could fail due to its structural instability (Buckling) rather than deformation due to high stress. The Autodesk Algor solution includes critical buckling analysis to ensure this won't be the primary mode of failure.
Thin walled plastic parts or sheet metal could be susceptible to buckling as well as traditional problems like truss or structural frame design.
While the structure below might have a high safety factor of 30 or more for the stress analysis, the buckling analysis shows only a multiplier of 27. This indicates that the structure could fail due to buckling rather than only exceeding the yield point of the material.
Contributed by Ben of the Tata Technologies CAD Geeks
As some of you may have heard, Autodesk has recently acquired Algor FEA technology which further strengthens the simulation capabilities for its customers. One element of the Algor technology is the ability to simulate heat transfer scenarios for both steady state and transient(time based) problems.
Here is an example of a temperature applied to electrical contacts being dissipated over time to arrive at a steady state temperature. This can help us to determine questions like: Will my chip overheat? Do I need to include additional cooling fins?
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Check out this video of the temperature arriving at steady state: Watch video Here
Contributed by Ben of the CAD Geeks
