As Engineers, we are interested to see how our multi-part design functions when various parts interact with each other. Take this really cool glasses model in Fig. 1, for example. As cool as it looks, we all know that it can easily break, when you sit on it accidentally. Well, with our General Contact feature, you can simulate this event. What is General contact? General contact automatically detects faces, edges, and parts in contact during a simulation run in OnScale Solve. In other words, the solver checks for all possible surfaces coming into contact during the simulation and enforces a s ..read more

What is plastic material behavior and why is it important? In this blog post, we will introduce plasticity and show how it can be simulated in OnScale Solve. What are Plastic material models? First, it is essential to have at least a basic understanding of the concepts of stress and strain in an object. When an external force is applied to an object, the stress in the object is a measure of the amount of load that is carried at any given point in the material that makes up the object. Furthermore, the strain is a measure of how much the material deforms at that point. If the stress is plotted ..read more

Introduction Contact mechanics is the analysis of stresses and strains arising in interacting bodies. This field is relevant for many practical applications such as metal forging, car crash tests, machining, and manyothers. In the simplest case, a contact mechanics problem consists of representing the behavior of two bodies coming in contact. The bodies are completely independent and interact with each other through their contact regions only. The bodies can be modeled as deformable, rigid, or a combination of the two. This blog gives an overview of the modeling technique used in OnScale Solve ..read more

When I was a kid, long before Spotify, iTunes and even Winamp, people used to go to physical stores to buy compact discs (a.k.a. CDs™). These devices proved to be a significant improvement over the previous ways of distributing music, namely cassettes and vinyl discs in a wide variety of ways, all of them being far outside the scope of this article. In any case, the CD player would lift the disc and make it spin around its center at a variable angular speed (between 200 and 500 RPM) so as to keep an approximately constant tangential speed at the laser location. This way, a uniform stream of b ..read more

If you have ever wondered why the temperature of your shower is so cold at the beginning and takes 1 min to get to body temperature, you know already what a Thermo-fluid problem is! Said simple, thermo-fluid simulation is the simulation of the changes of temperature with a fluid. It’s a coupling of 2 types of Physics: Fluid Simulation and Thermal Simulation Fluid physics (also called CFD like Computational Fluid Dynamics) simulates the velocity and pressure of a chosen fluid and thermal physics simulates the heating and cooling of the fluid and its changes of temperature. When do you use Th ..read more

A simulation using finite element analysis involves solving a large set of equations. To get a meaningful solution we need to ensure that we are solving both the correct equations and correctly solving the equations. And an essential aspect of a correct set of equations is a correct set of boundary conditions, so let’s make sure we are setting the right boundary conditions! This post may seem very basic at first, but keep on reading because we will dig into some subtleties of boundary conditions. Those of you who already know who Dirichlet and Neumann were might skip down to section  ..read more

Introduction Finite element simulations are powerful predictive tools, and while most performed simulations are linear, such as in structural engineering, the most interesting simulations are of nonlinear nature. In this blog post we explore nonlinear mechanical simulations, what their origin is and what types are out there and their availability in our simulation platform, Solve. For the sake of simplicity, small strains assumption and a quasi-static regime are used here; we leave large strains for a follow-up. Sources of nonlinearity The discretized principle of virtual work is recalled he ..read more

Introduction Finite element (FE) simulations are powerful predictive tools, and are essential to engineering design, simplifying design processes, and reducing prototyping costs. However, unfortunately and quite frequently, these get performed in a pure "black-box" fashion, by which the whole process of obtaining a solution is not fully understood by the user. While this is sometimes acceptable, as the corresponding FE package usually takes care of most details, it is nonetheless useful to understand what is going on behind the scenes. In this blog we explore the basic equations solved in FE a ..read more

Introduction A rigid body is an approximation of a very stiff material in the simulation. There is no deformation within this kind of body and the distance between any two points in the body remains constant during the simulation. Treating parts as rigid bodies instead of very stiff materials not only results in model simplification but also improves the conditioning of the global stiffness matrix, which in turn increases the accuracy with which a linear system of equations is solved. Since the material inside of a rigid body cannot deform, it is often sufficient to represent only the interfac ..read more

What is plastic material behavior and why is it important? In this blog post, we will introduce plasticity and show how it can be simulated in OnScale Solve. What are Plastic material models? First, it is essential to have at least a basic understanding of the concepts of stress and strain in an object. When an external force is applied to an object, the stress in the object is a measure of the amount of load that is carried at any given point in the material that makes up the object. Furthermore, the strain is a measure of how much the material deforms at that point. If the stress is plotted ..read more