Week 8

Morphing operation on a sheet metal component using ANSA Pre-processor

• Aim

Perform various morphing techniques on the given sheet metal component and discuss the use of morphing technology in various industries.

• Morphing

Morphing is a method effectively used to change the design of an existing model instead of going for a complete re-design of the model.

Morphing tools are fully integrated in ANSA environment, it can be used to re-shape both FE and geometry of the model.

Morphing can be used to modify an existing design, link with optimization or create new concepts for future studies. Applications of morphing can be found out in all disciplines crash, NVH, Durability, CFD etc.

There are two main methods of morphing in ANSA Domain-based morphing and Direct morphing

1. Domain-based morphing ( Box morphing )

It requires definition of control boxes assigned to the model in order to change the shape.

control points at the vertices of box can be moved to re-shape the model

2. Direct Morphing

It works with the existing features in the model. Morphing can we done by different type of movements of the features like rotational, translation, copy, scale, edge fitting, surface fitting etc.

Application of Morphing in various industries

Morphing is widely used in automobile industry when any new facelift model of an existing car needed to be designed.

optimized design of a new vehicle model is achieved easily through existing FE and geometry of the model thus significantly reduces the design time. Morphing helps to compare between new and old design.

sedan model car by Honda ( Honda Amaze ) is an optimized design of their hatchback model (Honda Brio ) using morphing techniques.

• Procedure

step 1 : First open the sheet metal model and perform a Topo operation in order to attach the faces together.

Step 2 : we can isolate the part we needed to do morphing operation and switch to Morph Deck

In order to do morphing first, we need to create a control box on the part by using Morph module > Boxes > New > ortho box

select the part we needed to morph and confirm with middle mouse click

as we can see in the image below a control box is created around the geometry and confirm it with middle mouse click

Now we can move the control points in order to change the shape of the model, by using Morph module > Box morphing > Move

select the control points wanted to move with left mouse click and by right-clicking on the morph box we can define a local co-ordinate for the reference of the movement of control points.

confirm the selection of control points with middle mouse click and we can move the control points in X, Y or Z direction in order to get the desired shape of the model

After desired shape is obtained confirm with middle mouse click to accept the shape.

• Final design change of the part

similarly we can change the shape of different parts of the geometry using Box morphing method.

we can split the control box created over the geometry using Morph module > Boxes > Split, and select the edges of the boxes you want to split.

thus by splitting the control box into several sections we can change the shape of geometry more accurately

• Learning outcomes
• Learned about basic Morphing techniques, how to create control boxes and how to move control points inorder to acquire the desired design shape of the geometry.
• Learned about the different tools used in Morph Deck of ANSA Preprocessor

• Conclusion

successfully performed basic morphing operation on the given sheet metal model in order to acquire desired design change.