Constraint Question

[Anonymous]

So I had a question about constraining a specific area of a surface.  Say for instance, you have a beam and you want to constrain both ends of the bottom surface.  Is there a faster and more efficient way of selecting the bottom surface nodes to constrain instead of selecting them one by one? 

I pretty much want to constrain one part of the bottom surface from moving at all while having a displacement constraint on the rest of the piece. 

[Sualp.Ozel]

If you have a CAD solid model and you wish to add a load/constraint to a small patch of a single large surface you have at least 2 options.

1) Split the large surface in to smaller sub surfaces using a CAD package. Inventor Fusion (which is included with Autodesk Simulation Mechanical is a good tool for this)

2) use the "rectangle" select tool to select all the "vertices" you wish to constrain, and then add the boundary condition.

[Anonymous]

The only problem with the rectangular select tool is that it selects that entire plane that the node is on and I only want to constrain the bottom surface of the piece.

[Anonymous]

good way is to change what ever yuou want in cad.

[Sualp.Ozel]

If you are still struggling with this issue please feel free to attach an image of the area of interest (or your simulation Archive file), so I can give you more specific directions.

[Anonymous]

You can do it by creating two splits on the bottom surface in Inventor before importing it so simulation, and adding a surface constraint within simulation.

This video shows how to add a split using inventor fusion, which is basically the same in inventor.

http://engineeringexploration.autodesk.com/content/module-2-editing-non-native-imported-geometry

Hope this helps