1898x
002480
2019-02-21

Question

How can I model a hole bearing?


Answer:

In the case of a hole bearing, the forces are only transferred by compression. Tensile forces do not occur. These effects could be modeled as follows (for an example, see the image):

1. Create an opening in a surface.

2. Create a beam with the nonlinearity failure under tension and place it in the opening. It is important to use a beam member and not a compression member (a compression member is a truss member, which would make the structural system kinematic).

3. Rotate the member in the opening and copy it several times.

Instead of the member, you could also fill in the opening with a surface with the stiffness membrane without tension. When using this surface stiffness, the following happens:

The calculation is performed in several iterations. After the first iteration, a check is made to see in which surface element for the main membrane stress the tension occurs. These elements will fail in the next iteration (to be more precise, the stiffness is greatly reduced).

Both modeling variants should give you roughly the same results.