Getting Plate/Mesh Center Stress or average stress in an area/Mesh

[reymart.laranjo]

Hi,

I'd like to know how to get the center stress of a plate/ mesh.

Instead of pointing at the corner nodes of a mesh, I'd like to get the center stress of a mesh. 

Thank you and kind regards,

mac

[John_Holtz]

Hi Mac,

There are two ways to interpret "stress at the center", and I am not sure which one you mean. So here are the two possibilities.

1. The center of the plate could be the center of the surface area; that is, the centroid of the 4-corner quad or 3-corner triangular element. To see this stress result, edit the contour plot, and set the "Data Type" to "Centroid". (Then there are always questions about showing nodal or elemental, average or no average, which I never remember off the top of my head and have to refer to the article Nastran In-CAD: Understanding Data Conversion, Data Type, and Contour Type.)
2. The center of the plate could be at the midplane, half way between the top and bottom faces. Since the bending stress is 0 at the midplane, what stress is at the midplane is the membrane stress. See the article Extracting membrane and bending stresses from results in Nastran.

Let us know if you were thinking of something else.