Creating Rigid Spring Virtual Parts

A rigid spring virtual part is an elastic body connecting a specified point, the handle point, to specified part geometries, behaving as a six degree of freedom spring in series with a massless rigid body that will stiffly transmit actions (masses, restraints, or loads) applied at the handle point, while stiffening the deformable body or bodies to which it is attached.

The rigid spring virtual part does not allow elastic deformation of the regions to which it is attached.

Rigid spring virtual parts can be applied to the following types of supports:

Point or VertexCurve or EdgeSurface or FaceVolume or Part
  

You can request history output of relative displacements and rotations and of total, elastic, viscous, and reaction forces and moments from a rigid spring virtual part. The support for the history output request is the meshed part.

This task shows you how to create a rigid spring virtual part between a point and a geometry support.

  1. Click the Rigid Spring Virtual Part icon .

    The Rigid Spring Virtual Part dialog box appears, and a Rigid Spring Virtual Part object appears in the specification tree under the Properties objects set.

  2. You can change the identifier of the spring virtual part by editing the Name field.

  3. Select a face or an edge of the part as a geometry support. You can select several geometry supports.

    The Supports field is updated to reflect your selection.

  4. Position the cursor on the Handler field in the Rigid Spring Virtual Part dialog box and select a vertex or point as the handle point (the handle point symbol appears as your cursor passes over it).

    • This point selected as handle must be a Part Design point.

    • If you do not specifically select a point, the centroid (the point at which the lines meet) will be used as the handle point.

    • When several virtual parts share the same handle point, only one finite element node is generated.

  5. Enter values for the six degree of freedom spring constants (translation stiffnesses and rotation stiffnesses).

  6. Click OK in the Rigid Spring Virtual Part dialog box.

    A symbol representing the spring virtual part appears on the corresponding faces.