Problem modeling welds

Sam_CH12
Sam_CH12 Altair Community Member

Hello, currently a student in mechanical engineering field, newbie hypermesh, I'm working on simulating a press machine welded frame. To aacomplish that, I divided the problem to 3 parts. Actually, I'm doing the second part which is consists of simulating a "Table" which is the base of the machine frame, in order to determine the optimised size of my square sections. As you can see in the first photo, there is a force of 135kN applied on a 300*300m^2 surface, section of square bars is 90*90*750mm^2 with 6mm thickness. So my goal is to model welds between square bars and the sheet. (All components are Steel).

My questions are :

  • I did leave 5mm between square bars and the sheet in order to model welds, is it a good idea ?
  • If it's complicated to model welds in general, how can i do to recover stress in the welding area and make a calculation by hand to see the reliability of the welds.

Thanks in advance !

Sam