Struggling with Buckling Analysis on Robot Assembly

Jagadeesh_0
Jagadeesh_0 New Altair Community Member
edited September 5 in Community Q&A

I've recently started working on FEA and I’ve run into a bit of a snag with a robot model I’m working on. Here’s the situation:

The robot functions in two main ways:

  1. It moves horizontally using a traverse arm.
  2. It has a second assembly with a vertical traverse that also includes a small horizontal traverse equipped with a grabber to pick up components.

I haven’t gotten around to doing any MBD analysis yet, but I jumped straight into analyzing the second assembly. The reason? The design engineer flagged that the plate supporting the vertical traverse might be buckling. Now, this didn’t make sense to me. The plate is a solid 16mm steel plate, and the entire assembly only experiences a maximum load of 2500 N. I couldn’t find any data that would suggest it’s actually buckling.

To be thorough, I went ahead and performed a Geometric Non-linearity analysis using incremental loading. On top of that, I did a transient analysis and a linear buckling analysis through the sub-assembly. After all that, the results showed no signs of buckling.

However, the design engineer is not convinced and insists that the plate is at risk of buckling. I’m starting to second-guess whether I might have missed something crucial in my analysis. Did I overlook a step or approach this incorrectly? Should I be considering a different type of analysis, or is there something else I can do to prove the plate’s stability?

Any advice or insights from those would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

P.S: I know it sound a bit like rant, bcoz I posted the same in reddit too :)

Tagged:

Answers

  • Adriano_Koga
    Adriano_Koga
    Altair Employee
    edited September 5

    really hard to tell just by the description, but it really looks hard to have it buckling with only 2500N, if this is a 16mm.. Mabe you should take a look were you have the larger free length of this plate, and evaluate this region. Additionally just double check if your boundaries or contacts around this region are representing accurately the degrees-of-freedom, and specially if they're not over-constraining your parts, making them stiffer than what they should be.

Categories