Idealization of Dowel pins in Creo Simulate

[h__]

Dear All,

for my study project, i am working with dowel pins in an assembly. I want to run Modal and static analysis of the assembly and i want to idealize these dowel pins as shown in the image.

Could anyone please give a feedback about how these dowel pins should be idealized.

[ChrisKaswer]

You may wish to use rigid links. Those should provide the idealization you're looking for...and fairly easy to apply. The only downside is the surfaces they are applied to will be treated as rigid, but that's likely not a poor assumption to make since your lengths appear short (L/d is appropriate).

[Chris3]

I like to make them beams. You create a point and connect that point with rigid links to the geometry and then you create a beam between the points.

The advantage of beams is that you can setup groups of degrees of freedom and release them with a mouse button click. For instance if you have a pin that goes into a slot then you release the vector that the slot is in.

The other thing I like about beams is when you look at the resultant loads in the result files you can see them superseded on the mesh which lets you know which is which and were the high loads are.

You can do all of this with springs too and just make the k vectors 0 to release them in those directions but then you have to keep track of what you named them to correlate the measured load with where it is. Just a matter of preference.

[ChrisKaswer]

Beams are another good option that will accomplish the goal. Beams offer the additional behavior of flexibility over a rigid link. For what appears to be this specific situation, rigid links are likely the simplest approach that should not degrade accuracy to any degree...I would guess the difference between these options is in the noise, again for this situation. Beams are often a better choice when there is a span/gap, long enough, between the components that are "linked", where the flexibility between the connected bodies needs to be considered. 

It's nice we have options (I recall when we didn't back when this tool was RASNA Mechanica!). The best choice is to select the simplest approach that meets your needs.

Cheers!