Week 4 -Wire Bending Challenge

Understanding the effect of wire bending using Ansys workbench

Objective: To perform an structural analysis to simulate the bending of a wire considering three different case setup and compare their results.

Simulations setup

Case (1) – copper alloy (Non-linear)

Case (2) - Aluminum alloy (Non-linear)

Case (3) – Magnesium alloy (Non-linear)

Structural Analysis:

Structural analysis is the process of calculating and determining the effects of loads and internal forces on a structure or an object

Input Geometry

The CAD model is imported and viewed using space claim,

The geometry includes the following component wheel, wire, and lever

Material:

Wheel- structural steel

Wire- copper Alloy/ Aluminium alloy/ magnesium Alloy

Lever-structural steel

Contacts:

Two frictional contact (f=0.2) are setup one between the wire and lever. The other between the wire and the wheel as shown below.

Contact settings

Formulation- Augmented Lagrange

Normal Stiffness factor-0.1

Update stiffness-Each iterations

Interfaces treatment – Add offset, Ramped Effects

Joint creations

A body-ground revolute joint is defined by selecting the inner surfaces of the lever hole, with Z-axis as rotational axis

Mesh

The mesh method is for all bodies are set to Tetrahedrons. The critical faces shown below are given a mesh sizing of 1.8mm

The mesh sizing is made finer (0.8) by choosing a sphere of influence(r=7mm) at the co-ordinate system shown

Analysis setting:

The analysis is set up for 8 steps with the following setting for all the steps.

When stabilizations are activated, it adds dampers to all the nodes. When the large displacement nodes try to move, the force is added to balance them thus favouring convergence. Energy Dissipations Ratio is given value between 0 and 1

step 1 steps 2-8

Boundary conditions

• The wheel is fixed by assigning the inner surface of the wheels hole as a fixed support .
• 
• The lever joint is given a rotation of about 140 degrees such that the wire bends around the wheel
• 

Solutions:

All the necessary output variable are selected such as von Mesis stress, stress intensity, equivalent strain etc.

Results

The maximum time step was 2 the solver converged at various time steps and dropped down to a lower time step value.

Case (1) – copper alloy (Non-linear)

Equivalent stress

Equivalent strain

Case (2) - Aluminum alloy (Non-linear)

Equivalent stress

Equivalent strain

Case (3) – Magnesium alloy (Non-linear)

Equivalent stress

Equivalent strain

copper alloy (Non-linear)	Aluminum alloy (Non-linear)	Magnesium alloy (Non-linear)
	Equivalent stress
	Equivalent strain

Based on the obtained results, we can find the aluminum alloy NL has the highest capacity to withstand the load while bending than the other two materials with the highest Equivalent elastic strain than the other two.

Conclusions

Thus structural analysis to simulate the bending of a wire considering three different case setup cases has been performed and the results were compared