Motorcycle on conveyor belt

Hugo Horth

Hello, I am attempting to create a model of a motorcycle on a conveyor belt for a class project on Altair Motionview. I am using the two wheeler library to create the motorcycle but I cant seem to find a way to model the conveyor belt. I have already tried using FIALA's Drum Road to try to simulate the conveyor belt but this configuration does not support lateral movement and therefore doesnt work. Does anyone have any idea of how I could make this work?

Thank you.

AnanthK

Hello - Unless the motorcycle is riding on the conveyor belt and the tires are generating longitudinal/lateral forces, the FIALA drum road is probably not a good use to simulate a conveyor.

Instead, you could try to use the belt-pulley sub-system to build a conveyor belt, and import the motorcycle model built from the wizard into that as a system. NOTE: Use discretized rigid bodies when creating the system, not NLFE (Nonlinear Finite Element), or you will have very long solve times! 

Here is some documentation to help with these: 

https://2020.help.altair.com/2020.1/hwdesktop/mv/topics/motionview/subsystems_belt_pulley_create_t.htm

https://2020.help.altair.com/2020.1/hwdesktop/mv/topics/motionview/systems_and_assemblies_import_system_t.htm

 

Roller Conveyor example as a reference: 

https://support.altair.com/community?sys_kb_id=bd3e63e81b4f10d08017dc61ec4bcb20&id=kb_article_view&sysparm_rank=1&sysparm_tsqueryId=096acc00db5ba450cfd5f6a4e296196e

 

Good luck! 

Hugo Horth

Thank you very much for the idea and the examples @Ananth Kamath Kota.

My main issue though is I do not know how to make the tire models interact with this belt-pulley subsystem or any other standard motionview entity. I thought they could only contact with special road files and I do not understand how I could make those road entities move in reference to the ground body.

Thanks 

AnanthK

@Hugo Horth - You are correct, tire models can only interact with road files, and you cannot have a moving road reference marker to the best of my knowledge. A quick test to verify that might be to make this marker reference another moving body instead of the default ground body, and see if the road surfaces move. 

But, before doing that let's take a quick step back - Can you describe what kind of interaction you're trying to simulate? Is the motorcycle riding/driving on the belt? Do you need accurate tire forces & moments? If the answer is no to both and especially the latter, then you could simply define contacts between the belt and tire graphics. Take a look at the "Lift Table" example in the Knowledge Base, where tires are defined with 3D contacts. 

Hugo Horth

Unfortunately, yes, one of the main goals of the simulation is to observe the maneuverability of a motorcycle on a conveyor belt so the tire models are required.

I have tried multiple ways of attaching the road reference markers of both wheels to an object moving in the opposite direction of travel but to no avail. Either the marker is not valid or the simulation simply does not behave as if it were.

AnanthK

That is an interesting use case, one I haven't come across in real life. So if I understand correctly, you want to model a motorcycle riding on a moving conveyor belt? If you tried attaching the road reference markers to a moving body in lieu of ground, please post the mdl/log files so we can take a look at what's happening at run time.