Week 4 -Wire Bending Challenge

WIRE BENDING SIMULATION

OBJECTIVE:

To perform a wire bending simulation on a wire component under three different cases with three different materials - copper alloy, aluminium alloy, magnesium alloy and to compare its equivalent stress and strain developed in the wire in all 3 cases.

PROCEDURE:

• Create a new static structural simulation
• Import copper alloy (NL), Aluminium Alloy (Non Linear) and Magnesium Alloy ( Non Linear) to model the wire
• Import the geometry file onto the Spaceclaim GUI
• Then the model module of static structural is again updated.
• Open the model in ansys mechanical module.

Material assignment

• The respective materials are applied to each individual components with Copper alloy for the wire in case 1 and al and mg in case 2 and 3 respectively
• The other two cases would involve material assignment of Al alloy and magnesium alloy (NL) for the wire component.

Contact region

• Two contact sets are established between the wire and lever and another one for the wire and wheel.

Mesh

• To refine the mesh of the workpiece at the contact regions, we can either increase the mesh density using sizing option or alternatively we can create a well structured ortho tria mesh on the speciment using face meshing feature

Loading condition

• Two fixed supports are created for the wheel and one end of the wire
• The lever is displaced about its revolute joint through a displacement of a certain limit at each time step increment.

Analysis settings

• Then the type of analysis and other simulation parameters like time step, no of steps etc are defined from the analysis settings.
• A total of 8 steps were defined with the displacement upto a certain random value at each time step.
• A min and max time step increment/decrement was set to 0.05 and 0.5 respectively for steps 2-8
• Large displacement and stability in non-linearity was turned on

RESULTS:

The following results were obtained

CASE 1 - Cu alloy NL

Equivalent stress in the wire

Equivalent strain in the wire

CASE 2 - Al alloy NL

Equivalent stress in the wire

Equivalent strain in the wire

CASE 3 - Mg alloy NL

Equivalent stress in the wire

Equivalent strain in the wire

CONCLUSION

Hence from the above results we can conclude that, the stress generated in the copper wire is far greater compared to that of generated in al or mg wire component. However the maximum strain is generated in the mg wire and this material has the least youngs modulus compared to the other two materials.