Modeling welds in seams of plate models: How-to

[Anonymous]

Unfortunately, my search capabilities seem to have failed me.

I modeled an existing thin-wall liquid storage tank in Inventor 2016 and ported it over to Simulation Mechanical 2016 for plate-style analysis.

As my liquid storage tank contains sharp corners in severely disconcerting locations, I find that I need to incorporate

fillet welds into my analysis to bring stresses from disconcerting to mildly alarming, instead.

I would assume that there isn't some simple method to select edges and "apply" fillet welds and sizes for my plate model inside Simulation Mechanical, as I cannot locate it.

Is there a primer on proper modeling technique for this within Inventor and/or Simulation Mechanical?

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

[KubliJ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous,

The challenge of welds.  Corner stress are impossible to resolve within simulation, every FEA software that I am aware of has not found a way to master this yet.  The current method to know if your model is good is to ignore the stresses at the weld and instead use the reaction forces at the weld to calculate the weld size.  But if you are getting failure stress at 3 or more nodes away from the corner, then you will likely have material failure no matter what weld size you use.

There is a great video that goes into the details a bit on how to do this in Inventor Nastran (Nastran In-CAD).  But we do not have as good of one for Simulation Mechanical.  But the principle is the same.  Get the reaction forces to calculate the weld size from.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6MPCb6V02M&t=2435s

Thanks,

James

[Anonymous]

James,

Thanks for taking the time to respond. As I broaden skillsets beyond design-focused FEA solutions (Paulin Group NozzlePro) to generalized purpose (Autodesk Products), I seem to encounter a bit of a learning curve.

In NozzlePro, you can input a weld size, and while the software is exclusively a code compliance shells analysis FEA, it seems to somehow be able to address the concern, though I am not aware of the specifics how it manages to achieve this. I suspect it intelligently tosses out stresses near these discontinuities as I think about it, as that would explain why in some cases, parts of the mesh just isn't rendered.

Again, thanks for your response.