- [Narrator] In this example we're going to be looking
at the factor of safety of this clamp.
Now before we get into the actual analysis,
let's go ahead and take a look at the model
and refine the geometry a little bit,
so we get a little bit better results.
Over here you can see I have a solid body folder
with four individual bodies.
So this is basically a multi bodied part,
and we need to combine these components together
so we have one component that we can
then analyze with Simulation Xpress.
If we had the full version of Simulation
it works with multiple bodies or assemblies,
and we can get into a more detailed analysis.
But in this case I'm going to show you a couple work arounds
so we can turn this into one individual part
and then run the factor of safety analysis
and see how we come out.
All right so the first thing we want to look
at is how we can simplify the model.
So down here you can see we've got all these individual
threads, and we don't really want those.
So let's go ahead and just suppress those out.
So they're gone.
Down here at the bottom,
notice we've got this coming through here.
You got two different bodies,
and this is really not needed, this piece right here.
So I could actually delete that out if I wanted to,
or I can come in here and just choose like a surface here.
Start a sketch, start a circle,
and let's just drag this out to the outside edge here
and snap to that, and then I can just go ahead
and do a feature extrude.
And just go ahead and just consume that body.
Just go up the other direction and go a little bit further.
It doesn't have to be perfect, right?
Just get close.
We want to do pretty much the same thing right over here.
Click on the surface here.
Start a sketch.
I'm going to use a circle.
Starting at the mid point of that just drag it out till
it's about mid line here, or somewhere in that region.
Doesn't really matter again to a feature's extrude,
and I'm going to be extruding that in the opposite direction,
right here, and we're going to go all the way up to a surface,
this one right there, and that's going to be
combining those two bodies together.
Pretty straightforward, and then the next one we need
to look at is this ball joint connection up here.
So, right now there's a little bit of a gap.
So we cut that thing in half.
You can see there's nothing touching between
the two parts here, and that's a bit of a problem.
But not to worry.
We can go ahead and just create
some more geometry to fix that.
So let's go ahead and choose a top surface up here.
Again, I'm going to choose a circle,
snap to the mid point of one of these circles here.
Let's go ahead and turn that one off so we can find it.
All right, now we might not want to be that big.
So let's just trim that end just a little bit.
All right, and then we'll go to features.
We'll do an extrude.
Let's go in the other direction,
and bring that up about half way to the ball.
Something like that looks pretty good.
If you cut it in half you can see now that we're engaging
basically the top half of that ball in a joint
which is similar to what you might see in real life.
So again, it doesn't have to be exactly perfect,
because we know these results aren't exactly right either,
but we want to get close to something that's realistic
so we can get fairly good values out of the software.
All right, so now we have one body over here.
You can see the folder's gone.
We have one combined body,
and now we're ready to start doing an analysis.
So go over here to evaluate, Simulation Xpress.
Click on the options.
I want to be in English units.
Click OK.
Click on next.
We're going to be adding a fixture.
So the fixture here I want to hold
this face right there in place.
And notice, that's exactly what we get.
It doesn't move.
Click on OK.
Perfect, and now we're going to go next.
We're going to go add a force or pressure.
Either one of those will probably work pretty good here,
but I'm going to go ahead and say it's a force,
and I'm going to choose that surface right there.
And of course, we're going to be going down.
Let's go ahead and start with 500 and see where we end up.
Click OK.
Click on next.
Let's go ahead and choose a material.
Now, generally I try to choose materials ahead of time.
In this case I did have something
already selected as far as alloy steel.
Let's go ahead and apply that.
Click OK.
And now we do have alloy steel.
Click on next.
And go ahead and run that simulation.
Okay, so we're getting exactly what we're expecting, right?
We're expecting that clamp to kind of open up
as it's clamping down, so that does look good.
Click on yes for continuing, and you can see here
it is giving us a factor of safety of 4.46.
So, we're generally looking for something like this,
a probably a three times factor of safety.
So we're well within that region for this design.
It's exactly what we're looking for.
If you want to, you can of course review the stresses
and where they're showing up,
and of course those all do make sense, pretty much.
Go over here to displacement and see what's moving the most.
Obviously this lower corner here is moving the most,
but that's really not that relevant to the design.
It's just showing that it's moved the furthest amount.
Really the von Mises stresses here are what we're looking
for as well as that factor of safety.
So as you can see, and what we've done in this model,
we do have a factor of safety of over four, which is great,
and that just means that we've got a design
that's going to work, and we feel pretty confident about it.
Even if there is a little bit of an error,
we're at a four times factor of safety.
We feel that we have a safe product,
and we're good to go.