How to find deformation of loaded wheel on rigid surface?

For the Motion analysis, you will need to convert the cylinder to a Flexbody in order to allow the body to be deformable. The compression of the body can then be viewed using the Flexible Body tool:

If you are experiencing penetration of contacts, then they likely are not stiff enough. You will need to review the contact parameters and increase the stiffness values.

It looks like the contact size in the Structural Analysis does not dynamically update, hence the deformed shape.

I quickly mocked up an example using the Motion Analysis. Please see the results below:

This should be suitable for a preliminary analysis, such as to find out if there will be spoke contacts or general compression amounts. The simulation can be improved using smaller mesh sizes, stiffer contacts, etc.

If you are trying to use this model for things like durability or lifecycle analysis, I would still avoid using this Flexbody method as flexible bodies are not suitable for large-scale deformation, hyper-elastic materials like rubber, and local plastic deformations, as the superposition of modes only applies to linear systems.

Hope this helps!

Adam Reid

All comments

If you are looking to apply a load to the bottom of this wheel and see the deflection response, a Structural Analysis in Inspire can be suitable to your needs. The 'road' can be replaced with either a distributed force or point load and the results from the various load cases can be analyzed.

I would try to avoid the Motion Analysis and flexible bodies for this analysis, however. It should be noted that flexible bodies are not suitable for large-scale deformation, hyper-elastic materials like rubber, and local plastic deformations, as the superposition of modes only applies to linear systems.

Hope this helps!

Adam Reid

Hello Adam,

Thanks for your answer, it seems like a part of my question was cut off. What is important for the simulation is that the more the wheel deforms the more the contact area with the ground increases. Is there however a way to simulate that when using a distributed load? e.g. a distributed load that has a non-constant area.

Due to larger deformations the internal structure will also mean the wheel will have self contact during deformation, is that automatically taken into account for the simulation?

In that case you can still include the contact plate in order to include the changing contact area, as I may have over-simplified the original setup.

If you anticipate the structure coming into contact with itself, then you may want to partition the body so that the relevant faces can be assigned to contacts.

Hope this helps!

Adam Reid

Hello Adam,

Once again thanks for your reply. I unfortunately still don’t get the results I want, maybe I am missing something. It seems like the problem should be relatively simple, so ill break down what I did below.

Structure Analysis

The first approach is using the structure analysis.

I have a cylinder, free in vertical direction on a fixed ground. Force is applied at the center of the cylinder. Now I want to observe the deformation when contact between ground and cylinder are taken into account. Running the simulation will show the following:

Here the cylinder will penetrate the ground. I tried with many different setting in the ‘contacts’ tool (e.g. changing tolerance & clearance) but no simulation showed the cylinder colliding with the ground.

Motion analysis

The same situation but for motion analysis, where the contact is a motion contact between cylinder and ground will run, but does not allow me to look at the deformed cylinder results. All I observe is the cylinder penetrating the ground with a couple mm at the start of the simulation. Here I’ve also tried playing around with the motion contact settings, but no results.

Analyzing the part after the motion does show a deformation plot, but not the deformed object I want to see.

Which of the two approaches should I follow, and what do I change to get the desired result?
Kind regards,

Tim

For the Motion analysis, you will need to convert the cylinder to a Flexbody in order to allow the body to be deformable. The compression of the body can then be viewed using the Flexible Body tool:

If you are experiencing penetration of contacts, then they likely are not stiff enough. You will need to review the contact parameters and increase the stiffness values.

It looks like the contact size in the Structural Analysis does not dynamically update, hence the deformed shape.

I quickly mocked up an example using the Motion Analysis. Please see the results below:

Hope this helps!

Adam Reid

Hello Adam,

Thank you very much! This is exactly what I needed. I managed to get it working. It turned out one of the problems I had was that the joints/supports were flexible instead of rigid.

No problem! Glad I could help.

Thanks,

Adam Reid