Water tightness errors really bug me. Any easy way to solve these?
Water tightness errors really bug me. Any easy way to solve these?
(OP)
I have a tubular frame and half the time I get water tightness errors. What gives and is there any way to find and fix these in the Model? I am using Alibre and Algor Design Check.





RE: Water tightness errors really bug me. Any easy way to solve these?
I don't use Alibre, but are you using the Algor icon within Alibre to go from one to the other? If not, what format are you exporting?
RE: Water tightness errors really bug me. Any easy way to solve these?
RE: Water tightness errors really bug me. Any easy way to solve these?
RE: Water tightness errors really bug me. Any easy way to solve these?
Brick elements for tubes and plates will not give even remotely the correct answer. There is a reason why beam theory, plate theory, and brick theory are addressed differently in most software packages...the structures behave differently!
Bricks will be overly stiff in bending for both the beams and the plates. Don't know what your structure looks like, but I would question the results that you have been able to obtain unless you have been able to, at a minimum, control the element types and the mesh.
RE: Water tightness errors really bug me. Any easy way to solve these?
1) A small fillet or chamfer.
2) The transition of a radius or chamfer across two non-coplanar surfaces.
If you see where the watertight problems are it can speed you to a solution. The way to show them in DesignCheck is to go to (on the toolbar) View > Options > Layer Control. This pops up the Layer control dialog box, turn off all layers except Layer 2 (I think that's one) and the problem area will be bounded, along element borders, in red.
RE: Water tightness errors really bug me. Any easy way to solve these?
I've tried to mesh a welded tubular frame with shell elements and wasted 3 weeks trying to get the meshing to work. It never did. In the end it was the wrong approach anyway.
I assume that when you say "tubes in bending with some plates" that there are some triangular gussets welded to the frame. If there are welded plates at the joints of the frame these can be modeled as plates attached directly to the beam elements.
A frame structure with gusseted plates is most easily modeled in ALGOR "by hand." It's really not as bad as it sounds, and will be a lot faster than fighting with the automatic meshing tools.
When you need higher fidelity results at the joints you can always make detailed 3-D submodeled using the internal forces from the beam element model.