Inspire to Do More | DIY Home Project
Altair EmployeeSure, anyone can do a structural analysis on an airplane or car. But have you tried on one of your home projects? Hi, I’m Jason, and that was my thought as I was sitting up on this new playset for my daughter asking myself, “Is this safe enough for her”.
If there was only some way I could spend a couple of hours (or less!) on a beautiful Saturday afternoon to give myself a bit of a quick sanity check. And let’s be honest, I just wanted to be able to say I conducted a structural analysis on my daughter’s playset.
But let’s take a couple of steps back.
We purchased this playset fully constructed on someone else’s property with no real plan for disassembly, transportation, and reassembly. But it worked out. And now we were tasked with putting it back up promptly so it could be thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the summer.
Now keep in mind, we had no CAD models from Design, we had no manufacturing drawings. Just some meticulous notetaking from my wife and an eagerness to use some power tools from me.
While I was standing up on the platform assembling the playhouse, I gave it a little shake and imagined the random vibration response of a dance party from a bunch of 4-year-old kids (and maybe one or two adults). The current design just would not do, (it was probably fine, I just wanted/needed an excuse to over-engineer). This was just a big ol’ mass sitting on top of a spring. And I needed to stiffen up that spring a bit.
So, I poured myself another coffee and opened Inspire to get to work. Now like I mentioned, I had no CAD models or drawings, just the physical parts, and assemblies. With a little measuring and a lot of guesstimating (I didn’t have any safety concerns, was just having some fun with this) the Inspire Sketch tools quickly took the playset from lines to concept design. Using these tools is a snap (pun fully intended).
I created common parts like the 4x4 support post and used the Move tool to copy/paste them into their correct positions. Mirror and symmetry can also be helpful in your projects, so try to utilize them whenever you can.
After getting the parts created and in the approximate location, the auto contact glued them into place. No need to worry about creating any attachments manually or needing to know the correct solver cards to perform this analysis. Today I am just a father building a playset using some tools I sort of have a clue about and glanced at the instruction manual (just like every other day). Fortunately, Inspire does most of the work for me and is intuitive to use.
Now for the fun part, applying the boundary conditions. What kind of conditions should I look at; earthquake, hurricane? We live in Wisconsin, so probably unlikely. Snow load on the roof? Now that is something we must worry about and can easily be done by applying pressure to the roof surface. To start with, I am going to ground (fully constrain) the support posts. We can worry about the force of a giant robot later.
But for now, I want to run a normal modes analysis to compare the difference of the baseline design, which was just the four posts, and my idea of putting 45° gussets in as many corners as I could (I did say I wanted to over-engineer this thing, right?).
My conclusion was adding the gussets increased the overall stiffness by approximately 40%. Now I didn’t need to go through all this to know that reinforcing those corners would brace everything up. But it was fun, I felt pretty good about myself (if not a bit nerdy) and now I can share my experience with you.
Here is the final design. And so far it has held up to wind, rain, snow, an ocean voyage, lava monsters, and more.
For your next home project of finally putting up those shelves, open up Inspire and make sure those shelves hold your Encyclopedia Britanica set. Or better yet, run an optimization to fully design them!
Thanks for reading and let Altair help Inspire you on your next project.
Comments
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nice (and fun) project!
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Still standing after a bit of heavy snow last night!!!
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