×
INTELLIGENT WORK FORUMS
FOR ENGINEERING PROFESSIONALS

Log In

Come Join Us!

Are you an
Engineering professional?
Join Eng-Tips Forums!
  • Talk With Other Members
  • Be Notified Of Responses
    To Your Posts
  • Keyword Search
  • One-Click Access To Your
    Favorite Forums
  • Automated Signatures
    On Your Posts
  • Best Of All, It's Free!
  • Students Click Here

*Eng-Tips's functionality depends on members receiving e-mail. By joining you are opting in to receive e-mail.

Posting Guidelines

Promoting, selling, recruiting, coursework and thesis posting is forbidden.

Students Click Here

Jobs

Steel Wheel FEA

Steel Wheel FEA

Steel Wheel FEA

(OP)
I trying to run a FEA in Solidworks on a steel wheel on a flat plate and I am having trouble with an infinite amount of stress along the contact area "strip or line" between the plate and wheel, since the steel wheel doesn't compress and provide an area like a rubber wheel would.

Does anyone have any advice on running this FEA or determining what material to use?   

RE: Steel Wheel FEA

Have you tried refining the mesh in and around the strip?  If that helps, then continue to refine the mesh until the results don't change, indicating that you have mesh independence - just an idea that you may have already tried.

Dave

RE: Steel Wheel FEA

Given you probably have zero area under the wheel then you'll have infinite stress.
The contact area is generally very small so you're better modelling just a very small angle of the wheel that is directly in contact with the plate, rather than a full or semi partial wheel going back to its centre. That way you can refine the mesh sufficiently to look at the herzian contact stresses under the wheel. A hand calculation would probably be much quicker though unless you have complex loading.  

Tata  

RE: Steel Wheel FEA

there are some standards that define the area of contact between the wheel and rail (don't remember which though).
also i don't think that you are supposed to use fea for that kind of tasks due to reasons mentioned (area) and safety. the calcs were quite straightforward anyway.

RE: Steel Wheel FEA

Ricky,

What kind of analysis are you trying to do? Which solver are you using? This is a non-linear contact problem. Can you post your boundary conditions and how you have setup your contact elements?

TOP
CSWP, BSSE
www.engtran.com  www.niswug.org

"Node news is good news."

RE: Steel Wheel FEA

(OP)
Could you help me out with the simple hand calc?

RE: Steel Wheel FEA

Ricky,

Get yourself a copy of Roark & Young. FEA analysts will often use the hand-calcs in this book to check their FEA results. You might be able to borrow a copy from the library just to see what it holds.

It's pretty easy to find the hand calc using Google. Like this

TOP
CSWP, BSSE
www.engtran.com  www.niswug.org

"Node news is good news."

Red Flag This Post

Please let us know here why this post is inappropriate. Reasons such as off-topic, duplicates, flames, illegal, vulgar, or students posting their homework.

Red Flag Submitted

Thank you for helping keep Eng-Tips Forums free from inappropriate posts.
The Eng-Tips staff will check this out and take appropriate action.

Reply To This Thread

Posting in the Eng-Tips forums is a member-only feature.

Click Here to join Eng-Tips and talk with other members!


Resources