Best practices to simulate shaft-Bearing assemblies

Julio_21000

Dear,

I would like to simulate an assembly made out of one shaft and two bearings. For these two bearings I have radial, axial and tilting stiffness values out of another calculation. Therefore I think about setting these stiffness values using springs. But I am afraid of getting an unstable assembly that would lead to large displacements.

Is there any other method within Simlab to simulate bearings?

Thank you.

Best regards

Ioannis_Makris

Hello Julio,

In most simple cases bearings are not modeled. Instead, the bearing assembly is used for creating the appropriate constraints (fixed bearing and floating bearing).

If you want to go a step further you can create the bearing bodies, assign the appropriate material and observe what happens. In this case rigidity and stiffness is relevant to the bearing geometry and material.

If you want to create a model in which the geometry of the bearings is not present, yet the stiffness to certain DOFs is, then the spring option is a nice alternative.

The thing is, you cannot know if your model is unstable before running the Non-Linear Solution and observe what is happening at every increment.

My suggestion would be: Start with Linear Static, then go to Non-Linear Static with fixed and rigid constraints by adding non-linearities one by one (Start with Large Displacement, material and then contact). When your Non-Linear model converges to expected values you can experiment with other boundary conditions and different elements (Springs etc.).

I hope this helps.

Kindly,

Ioannis Makris