Creating Clamp Boundary Conditions

Clamp boundary conditions fully constrain the movement of all degrees of freedom to zero.

You can apply clamp boundary conditions only in mechanical steps.

Clamp boundary conditions can be applied to point/vertex, curve/edge, surface/face, or body supports; to a point, line, surface, or body group; to a virtual part; or to a rigid coupling feature or a smooth coupling feature. When you select the support, you can also select an existing clamp from a different analysis case that was created in the Generative Structural Analysis workbench. The new clamp boundary condition is applied to the same region as the clamp created in the Generative Structural Analysis workbench. You can modify the region only by modifying the original clamp feature in the Generative Structural Analysis workbench.

Note:  For static analyses, make sure you define sufficient boundary conditions to prevent rigid body modes from occurring in your model.

This task shows you how to create a clamp boundary condition on geometry.

  1. Click the Clamp Boundary Condition icon .

    The Clamp BC dialog box appears, and a Clamp object appears in the specification tree under the Boundary Conditions objects set for the current step.

  2. You can change the identifier of the boundary condition by editing the Name field.

  3. Select the geometry support (a point, an edge, a surface, a body, a clamp, a virtual part, or a coupling feature that you created in the Generative Structural Analysis workbench). Any selectable geometry is highlighted when you pass the cursor over it. You can select several supports to apply the boundary condition to all supports simultaneously. You can also select an appropriate group.

    The Supports field is updated to reflect your selection.

  4. Click More to view the propagation status of the boundary condition. The propagation status shows the following:

    • Whether the boundary condition was Created in this step or Propagated into this step.

    • Whether the boundary condition is Active or Inactive.

  5. Click OK in the Clamp BC dialog box.

    Symbols representing the constrained degrees of freedom are displayed on the geometry.