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Why are the two objects not moving/falling simultaneously? [Abaqus/Explicit/Drop]

pvrvarun

Mechanical
Joined
Nov 23, 2014
Messages
7
Location
US
Disclaimer: I am a new and novice user of Abaqus.
I am trying to simulate a rigid body falling along with a thermoplastic tray (with rigid body above the tray) onto the floor from a certain height, to study cushioning properties of the tray. These are supposed to move in unison until they hit the floor. Below is the setup I have.
I do not have material properties for the rigid body and I am trying to only study the tray's deformation, so I applied a point mass to the centroid of the rigid body to simulate weight. I did apply a dummy material with negligible density.
I positioned these two slightly over the modeled floor (5mm above) and applied two velocity Predefined fields for these two objects separately in the direction of floor to simulate free-fall.
The floor is also made a rigid body and is locked with Encastre.
I also have only one Dynamic, Explicit step for 0.03 seconds.
I applied general contact for the whole setup (1 frictionless (tangential) and 1 hard contact (normal)).

When I run the simulation, only the tray appears to move. It hits the floor, rebounds and hits the rigid body all in 0.01s and does it again by end of the run. The rigid body only starts to ever slightly move at the very end of simulation. Why is it that the tray bounces between the floor and the rigid body couple times even before the rigid body starts to move while I have same velocity applied to both of them? Since velocity if the only external force acting on this system, shouldn't they move in unison? I tried this with a Gravity load applied as well to see if that changes anything and it didn't. The rigid body is also much heavier than tray due to point mass so I am confused why this stays almost stationary as if it is fixed in space. Am I doing the contact setup wrong or is there something I am missing?
View attachment Drop-Test.m4v
 
You should provide reasonable values for the inertia of the rigid body. Either model it as deformable, assign a section with a material imitating steel or whatever this part could be and then apply a rigid body constraint (this way you can easily make it deformable again for testing and the inertial properties of the rigid body will be taken from the material definition) or model it as discrete rigid (mesh inly the surface) and then apply point mass and inertia (calculated assuming some material such as steel) only to the reference point.

Also, make sure you are applying the initial velocity to the reference point of the rigid body.
 

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