Wire rope

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I am trying to simulate wire rope and a friction contact between a plate of steel. There is a bend in the rope. My first thought was to try to make the rope out of truss elements to simulate the motion of wire rope. Then somehow attach the wire rope to the adjacent plates, and include surface contact with friction.

But surfact contacts are not available for 2D elements connected to brick elements so that does not work very well. Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Robert

[Anonymous]

The rope that I am trying to model is 1.125" in diameter. I modeled a bunch of .25" long round sections and connected the center of the solid pieces with truss elements. There is a 1/32" gap between the round pieces and they were set up with surface contacts to adjacent parts that they would be interacting with. A force is applied to the face of the last round element. What are your opinions on trying to run it in this manner.

Thanks,

Robert

[AstroJohnPE]

Hi Robert,

What is the goal of your analysis? What effect does the friction with the rope have on the analysis? Perhaps there is another way to simulate the friction. I'm guessing the plate that the rope contacts is round, but it doesn't need to be for this following suggestion. Perhaps you could apply nodal forces to the truss elements to simulate the friction. If the steel plate is round, a local coordinate system applied to the wire rope would make it easy to apply the nodal forces in the tangential direction.

Also, what analysis type are you using? I'm fairly certain that MES allows surface-to-surface contact between truss elements and brick elements. I do not know whether friction can be included or not. If you are using linear stress analysis, you could use hand-drawn gap elements to connect the wire rope to the bricks. What you would need is the mesh on the bricks to line-up with the location of the wire rope. Then duplicate, copy-join and scale the lines from the bricks to form the section of rope in contact with the bricks. If you are working with a CAD solid model, split the face of the brick part where the rope makes contact.

[Anonymous]

Attached are two of the attempts that I have made. Both of these were done in MES. The goal is to determine the holding ability and the stress in both of the parts seen in the images. One of the pieces is a wedge. Without friction the forces seen will be much greater than with friction.

I have not tried using gap elements with a linear analysis. I will have to give that a try. I have been splitting the truss element that represents the wire rope into small segments. Would it be better if I left the straight segments as 1 or 2 segments and then connect the center point of that to the appropriate surfaces?

[Anonymous]

I am still struggling with this one. Any opinions on ways to accomplish this?

Thanks,

Robert