Ansys Rigid Body Dynamics Tutorial Pdf

Rigid Body Dynamics in Ansys Mechanical Products The animations on this page show a couple examples of the rigid body dynamics available within Ansys. Ansys Mechanical has a full family of joints to model any assembly and bring it through its full range of motion.

Hi there,

I would like some advice on how to work with rigid bodies in Ansys Workbench in a multi-body, flexible-rigid simulation.

I am trying to simulate a rigid 'rocker' applying a time and spatially varying contact pressure onto the pavement by rocking back-and-forth, as shown in the image below. Essentially, I am modelling an accelerated-pavement-tester.

One way I envisaged doing this, was to split the simulation into two steps:

In the first step, I apply a vertical force onto the rigid rocker via its pilot node, which is located at the center of curvature of the bottom rocker surface, as shown below. I will put a frictional contact between the rigid rocker and the pavement surface. Under the vertical load, both the rocker and the pavement surface would be displaced downwards.

In the second step, I will constrain the y-displacement of the pilot-node, thus maintaining contact pressure onto the pavement, while moving the x-location of the pilot node back and forth, as shown below. This should result in a rolling action due to friction between the rocker and pavement.

Does this seem like a sensible way to modelling this? The issue is that I am unsure how to constrain and apply loads to rigid bodies.

I know that their the motion is controlled by one point - in the ANSYS documentation, this is called the 'pilot node', with all BC's applied to that node. However, in Workbench, I cannot find where to define this 'pilot node' or how to reference this point when defining BC's. So far, I could not find this information in the documentation. Does this have to be done in Mechanical APDL?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Kind regards,

Kai-Yeung