I need to bend and twist a sheet into a spiral, but it is difficult to make it by setting moment at one side of the sheet with the other fixed. Maybe there is a more effective way to do this?
Thanks for your kind reply. However, in the following step, the sheet will be applied higher temperature to expand and the former bending and twisting will be unloaded. It seems that your rotation method is not suitable for this situation.
Does this analysis represent some physical manufacturing process ? Maybe you could simulate it using rigid tools. If not then the simplified approach with prescribed moment/rotation should suffice. As long as it's elastic deformation, it can be recovered in subsequent steps (multistep analyses are useful in such cases) when you remove the loading/boundary condition.
Removing (deactivating) a boundary condition makes the solver replace it with equivalent forces and ramp them down to zero during the whole step (assuming that a static analysis is used). So you can simulate unloading this way.
Thanks for your advice. BTW, do you know how to bend the beam by setting rotation on its free side? I coupled the free side with continuum distribution, and apply rotation at the key point. But the beam only bends in a