Follow Along: Buckling Analysis

In this lesson, we will run a buckling analysis. I already have the FE model and the boundary conditions completed in the starter file, so I’ll walk through briefly what is occurring with that. If you haven’t already done so, please download this starter file, which is below this video, to follow along.

What I have is just this box, this column. In our analysis setup, I have that box created, and I’m going to set up my FE model. This has one component; it’s a single body, so I won’t be using connectors, and I’ll just have one F component in there, which will be containing my F mesh and my material. For my FE mesh, I’m going to use our Mesh from Implicit Body block. I just convert it to a mesh, then I remesh it, and I have an edge length of 1 mm. Then I convert that to a volume mesh and an FE volume mesh.

We also have to define our attributes and our material. In this section, I just have my material defined, which is general aluminum, and my F model is complete. Once I’ve created the FE model, I also have my boundary conditions, so let me show that as well.

We’re going to have a force at the top of this, and I created that using an F Boundary by Flood Fill block. So I just have my top boundary, and I’m also going to have a top restraint and a bottom restraint. At the top of this column, I have my top boundary in here, and it is going to be unrestrained in the Z-axis. You can see I left this as optional, but in all of the other axes and in rotation, it will be restrained. So I have this top restraint and then I have my bottom restraint, which is also using an Fe Boundary by Flood Fill block, and I have it restrained along all of the axes and all the rotations.

So these are our boundary conditions, and we have our FE model. The next thing that we’ll do is add this into a buckling analysis block. So I’ll add a new section, and I’ll label this buckling analysis. I can go to my Design Analysis or my Simulation tab and choose that buckling analysis for that model.

I’ll use our FE model in the analysis setup, and I can just write that directly in. For our load case, I have three load cases, so I’ll add two more items in that list and choose our force, our top restraint, and our bottom restraint. For number of modes, I’ll place two, so I’ll type “i” so we only view this. If we go into our block details under properties, we can see that we have our buckling load factor, and there will be two of those because we defined our number of modes to be two. We can also define our minimum and maximum eigenvalue as well, so you can control that.

If we look at our buckling analysis, we have those two load factors. If I turn on that displacement, I like to also view that force and that bottom restraint or top restraint, so we can see those forces are… and we can see that scale factor, how it’s buckling, and we can look at that for both of these options. And again, you can put in a number of modes as well. So if I have four of these modes, we’re going to have other options as well for those eigen values. And so this is our buckling analysis.