Weld Circular Patterns

[Anonymous]

I am building a cylindrical chamber, and each part uses gussets welded on the outside for structure.  There are 36 gussets on each part so I use the circular pattern to place these 36 parts at equal spacing.  I would like to put welds on these gussets, and thought I could use the cylidrical pattern to copy the welds along with the gusset.  I am new to Inventor Pro 2013, is there a way that this is done?

Thanks,

Steven

[blair]

No short cut, just like the welders, you are going to have to place the welds. Since the welds reside within the weld enviroment you can only use the tools that are within the weld enviro.

[blair]

Or just weld up one gusset and do a crop-view with a note that all gussets are to be welded  this way. If this short-cut will not affect other aspects such as total weight and C/G or possible interference issues with other components.

[Anonymous]

We were planning on doing an FEA of the assembly, and a larger plate is welded to these 36 gussets on top.  So I would need to have all the welds in place for this.  I was hoping that a circular pattern would work so if we had to change the weld size, I would not need to do it on each.

[kstate92]

Or, give up on the rather simplistic (and neglected) Inventor weld module and model one weld bead as an actual part with the material set to a correct weld metal. This will allow you to pattern it and get the correct weight and CG values and as a bonus, model the weld probably far closer to reality than their rather prismatic weld module.

[blair]

Not sure which version of FEA you are using, but you may be able to simplify your model by only modeling 1/4 of it and using the symmetry functionality.

[m.granata]

If I understand this sounds like a vessel with gussets attached to it?  Aside from your weld pattern issue to reduce your modeling work, if you are going to perform an FEA analysis on the assembly I would not include the weld beads in the FEA model.  From my experience this complicates the FEA model geometry too much resulting in a poor quality mesh and consquently improper results.  Also, if this a vessel and it falls under the definition of a thin wall vessel you may want to condider using a surface model instead of a solid model for the FEA model.  This will also simiplify the FEA model and should still generate the stress results needed, even to apply to the equations in the ASME pressure vessel codes.