Elastic plate deformation
 

Hi all,

I have two rays that can rotate around a shaft and a piece of sheet between them as seen in the image below:

https://ibb.co/hUzik6


I was thinking if the following is possible in any of the Ansys workflows:
- make a rigid connection/contact between the rays and the membrane when the rays are in their horizontal position and aligned with the plate.
- add revolute joints to the rays so that they rotate around their shaft
- apply loads to the revolute joints to animate their rotation.
- the plate would be elastic so that when the rays are further apart from their initial horizontal position the plate would be able to deform.

Can anyone tell me if this is possible and how to do it? I am relatively new to Ansys, so don't want to start doing something and find out a month later this is not even possible.

Best wishes

Hi Giovanni,

Yes, you can do this with Ansys using the RBD and specify the plate to be elastic. You can change the joint behaviour using command snippets and you can also activate / deactivate elements during the analysis using the EKILL and EALIVE APDL commands.

You should start with RBD tutorials that you can find on the Ansys Customer portal.

Have fun ;)