Roller Chain Generator without a closed loop

[abaird]

I'm designing a lift truck with a "chain over" lift - the lift cylinder has a sprocket mounted on the end of the rod, and the chain is grounded on one side.  The other end of the chain is mounted to a lifting carriage so that as the cylinder extends and pushes the sprocket up, the chain rolls over it and the carriage moves up (at twice the speed of the cylinder).  This is nothing new - it's pretty much how every single fork truck in the world operates.

My question is this:  can I use the roller chain generator to model this chain, or should I model the links and array them along a path?  My thinking is that if I can use the chain generator, I should be able to animate the chain using Dynamic Simulation.  But the chain generator seems to require a minimum of 2 sprockets in order to work - there's no way that I can see to have a "non-looped" chain or any way to just ground the end of the chain.

Anyone ever run into this?  Throughts or suggestions?

AB

[JDMather]

The "Chain Generator" does not create a chain anyhow - only a simplfied sweep representing the chain.

I would use it to create the two sprockets, grap the one and delete the rest and then make my own simplified representation of a chain (adaptive, or drive constraint or.....)

[bob_holland]

AB,

Here is a You Tube Video that you might find useful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmU7okhv0W8

Happy Holidays.

[abaird]

That looks like it'll work!

[abaird]

As it turns out - this does not work.  Problem is that each link of roller chain is actually two "pieces", if you will - an inner link and the outer plates.  So these need to remain flexible, and you can't array / pattern flexible objects.  I'm going to keep on fighting this, but it looks like I'll probably end up creating a solid extrusion, representative of the chain, instead of individual links.