Pre-Analysis & Start-Up — Lesson 2

Created by Sebastien Lachance-Barrett

Pre-Analysis

Euler-Bernoulli beam theory is a reasonable starting point for this problem. In the table below, we compute predictions for the axial bending stresses at the extreme fibers at the beam mid-span using this theory and compare the predictions with the experimental results:

Here the axial stresses are normalized so as to be independent of the material properties, load and geometry. Dimensionless maximum stresses are reported here, normalized by:

The predictions of the Euler-Bernoulli beam theory differ from the experimental measurements by 2% along the bottom of the beam and by approximately 10% along the top of the beam. This is reasonably close given potential experimental error, yet the disagreement may be enough to consider if the theory is applicable. We will continue with a full three-dimensional analysis to investigate any issues related to application points of loads and boundary conditions.

Start-Up

Launch Ansys Workbench and start a "Static Structural" analysis on the project page as shown in the video below. Note that this video comes from a different tutorial but the process is the same.