Continue to Site

Eng-Tips is the largest engineering community on the Internet

Intelligent Work Forums for Engineering Professionals

  • Congratulations waross on being selected by the Eng-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

how to pre-tension a truss (T3D2) connecting blocks in Abaqus CAE?

Status
Not open for further replies.

jvh1234

Mechanical
Dec 1, 2010
4
Hi all,
I am have a basic block-truss-block-truss-block assembly in abaqus CAE, where the outside blocks are fixed on all DoF and the inside block is free on all DoF. My intent is to treat the trusses as pretensioned cables, creating a spring-mass-spring arrangement where the center-block mass can oscillate.

Using tie constraints, I am able to link the trusses to the blocks, and a static load job shows reasonable stress and displacement contours in the trusses (i released BCs on one end block here to stretch both trusses). However, if I try to pre-tension the trusses using a "bolt load" as described in the manual, I get errors in the job check:


Error in job Job-1: 1 nodes may not be used with a multi-point constraint since they are also part of pretension section. The nodes have been identified in node set ErrNodeMPCPretenSec.


My question here is: Can you setup pre-tension in CAE, or is that only possible in the keywords Abaqus? How do you setup the 1-dof pre-tension node described in the manual? I think that may be my biggest problem because CAE didn't prompt me to assign a pre-tension node.

Also, can I use 1 pre-tension node for both trusses if the pre-tension has the same magnitude but oppposite normals?

Thanks for reading! I am a FEA newbie and I appreciate the good info here at eng-tips.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor