Stress at nodes/ element corners

[taylorp8]

Good day all, having a little trouble here. I want to view the stress at some nodes. Currently I can select an element and the stress values at each of the elements corners is listed but working out which corner is which is quite troublesome. When I select a node it only gives me the deformation. So at the moment I'm checking every element around a node and seeing which value stays the same to work out which is the corner I'm interested in. Surely there is an easier way of doing this, I'm trying to do stress linearisation and it's a bit labourious this way.

Thanks in advance

 

[rb1957]

what if you turned "Node labels" on ? ... i'm guessing the screen will be flooded with numbers !?

of course the easy (= lazy ?) way is to integorate the element, get the node with the stress you're interested in, then go to "window/show entities" to see where the node is.

Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati

 

[taylorp8]

I've managed to find what I was after, I needed to select Nodal under Contour options,then the stress is given in the Entity info pane when a node is selected. Why it couldn't just give this data anyway seems odd.
Another thing I don't quite understand is if, as is the case here, the solver outputs corner data then why is it possible to uncheck the box 'Use corner data'? In what situation would you want to do this? I've spent hours wondering why my stresses were lower than expected only to discover it's because a check box had got unticked at some point in the past.

 

[Worldtraveller]

I'm not 100% sure, but I think the lower stress results comes from FeMap averaging/smoothing the stresses across an element. In some ways, this is more accurate. The stresses at a node (especially at a free edge) can get unrealistically high. A trick I learned a long time ago for determining stresses at the edge of a part (like a possible stress concentration) was to put a very tiny (small area) rod element at the edge of whatever plate/2D elements you are interested in. I've tried this experimentally, and I can usually get good results that agree with standard, published stress concentrations, although I haven't tried it recently.