In today’s world of modern and exotic engineering materials, it is easy to overlook the importance of inexpensive yet extremely useful materials such as gray cast iron. Some of the reasons for cast iron’s continued use in industry include its compressive strength, corrosion resistance, machinability, and structural rigidity. Cast iron also has excellent damping capacity, which is useful in applications involving high frequency vibrations such as bearing and gearbox housings. We demonstrate ADINA’s cast iron modeling capabilities by investigating the stress distributions within a cast iron pillow block bearing housing under service loads.

Various tube and bar end forming technologies are widely used in the manufacturing industry. We present, in the above animation, an analysis of one such technology known as swaging.

A distinguishing feature in ADINA is that the elements, contact algorithms, etc. are all implemented without using any artificial factors. The use of these factors in industry generally lead to much numerical experimentation and uncertainty about the reliability and accuracy of the solution. To demonstrate ADINA’s explicit modeling capabilities, we present two impact analyses.  

We present particle traces and additional results from the artificial lung analysis discussed in the ADINA System Newsletter of June 2002. Please refer to the Newsletter for additional information about the artificial lung analysis.

ADINA is a unique tool to perform coupled CFD and structural analyses, and we are strengthening the program continuously for such applications. Here we focus on the analysis of a manifold and consider the turbulent fluid flow through the manifold, the temperatures in the fluid and the structure, and the stresses in the structure.

We present particle traces and additional results from the artificial lung analysis discussed in the ADINA System Newsletter of June 2002. Please refer to the Newsletter for additional information about the artificial lung analysis.

The animation shows a shell element model cut with a cutting plane.

It is often desirable to replace complex or expensive solid element models with structural elements possessing equivalent mechanical responses. Beam, truss, and spring elements are a few familiar examples, and they can be used in many circumstances. However, the response of bushings, bearings, ball joints, or structural components with general geometries, etc. can be more complex, with different and potentially nonlinear stiffness and/or damping responses in different degrees of freedom. Such cases cannot be modeled accurately with traditional structural elements. ADINA’s new connector element was developed to provide users with a convenient tool for these cases, and many others. The connector element is a 2-node large displacement generalized spring/damper element with linear or nonlinear material properties. Furthermore, the connector element possesses a user-defined convecting local coordinate system such that for rigid body motions, the relative nodal positions and orientations (local displacements and rotations) remain unchanged, and the element’s internal forces transform with the rigid body motions. In other words, the response of the structure being modeled will be preserved under rigid body motions. For example, a connector element modeling a shock absorber will predict the same response (relative to its attached local coordinate system) regardless of its orientation. Modeling Case

Hydraulic engine mounts are used to reduce automotive engine vibration and noise. The performance of the hydraulic engine mount due to variations in the excitation frequency and amplitude is of interest to the designer.