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Good Day All,
How would one setup an Mechanica assembly analysis where you have 2 cylinders in contactwith one structual member at different approach angles and the structual member deflects (bends) due to the load being applied in such a way that displacement at one cylinder causes the force at the other cylinder to increase while maintaining sytsem force balance?
The piston cavities of the cylinders are connected by hydraulic passages so when you push down on one cylinder rod the other cylinder rod extends. Cylinders do not have the samepistonareas.
Any ideas on how to go about setting this up in mechanica?
I'm not able to use mechanism analysis to do this asmechanism analysis only deals with rigid body members.
This member deflects (bending) under load.
Thanks for any help you can provide,
Don Anderson
Don,
You can create a mechanism in MDO that can approximate the stiffness of your beam with your active cylinders. First, run a Mechanica analysis on the beam with its supports oriented as they are in the real system and measure the stiffness in the direction you're most concerned with. Here's the trick - approximate the stiffness in one of a couple ways, torsional or translational, based on how you'd like to simulate its behavior. Then break the beam into two pieces, or more,and connect them with ajoint that you can apply your stiffness value to as a spring (translational ortorsional) equal to what you found it is in Mechanica. The mechanism will behave as it would as a flexible system (to the extent you model its flexibility). I gave a paper that included this topicat thePTC/User Conference in 2004. This approach works very well, so long asthe representation of your stiffness is adequate to capture what's happening.
Chris