Creating Boundary Conditions

You can think of Boundary Conditions (BCs) as your part’s environment. They represent all the internal and external elements acting on your model, such as forces, displacement restraints, heat generation, and pressure. You need a minimum of two BCs to run a simulation. Depending on the BC, the inputs are usually a Boundary, a Vector, and a Frame. The image below shows the current options for BCs in nTop.

Each of these boundary conditions is applied to a user-defined FE Boundary. To learn more about the different ways to select the FE Boundary shown below, check out our 102: Guide to Meshing course. In our Follow Along: Boundary Conditions lesson, we will also walk through this process from scratch. 

In the following few lessons, we will discuss the different FE forces and displacement restraints you can use for a Static Analysis. 

Glyphs are the markers that indicate boundary conditions in your simulation model. Yellow arrows represent the location and direction of the force applied, and red cones represent where the restraint is applied. 

To adjust the glyph size to match the scale of your model better, open your Display Settings and change the Glyph Size for Boundary conditions.