Autodesk Inventor Frame Generator & Analysis

okay good morning everybody my name is Dave Weitz Lee from envisage UK limited welcome to another of our Friday morning webcasts this will take about thirty minutes it's been recorded and the subject for this millings webcast is that we're going to run through invent a frame generator and the analysis of frame generator I hope to also give you some tips and tricks as we go through as well if you die any questions my email address is on the screen and our website together with that blog is as you see on the screen as well okay what are we going to do this morning we're just going to create a simple frame generator assembly I'm going to go through some tips that I've come across when using the frame generator and inventor will also work with multiple sub assemblies we're not only just working in single assemblies these days you will be designing separate sub assemblies placing them together into a GA and we want to see how this works as well we're going to run through the frame analysis software that you get with inventor professional and previous releases it was invents our simulation and we're also whilst we're in the analysis I'm going to explain how we add extra nodes and rigid links to the analysis for sub assemblies that we're going to be pushing through to the analysis for those of you who haven't got professional and want to do some form of stress analysis on a frame member then there are other methods that we can use that are available to you in standard inventor and I'll go through that at the end as well ok so just going to go into inventor and start a simple frame generator assembly the important thing with a frame generator is to always create the following in this order so we start off with an assembly file a blank assembly we're then creating here the model that's going to skeleton model I'll explain that in a second as we start modeling it give it a name that identifies it as the skeleton path because this doesn't want to be incorporated into your materials or class list and that said it's important when we do create missing place components to actually set the default Billa material structure to reference there's those two things this takes this part out to the Bill of Materials and parts list and more importantly also takes the mass properties away from the assembly as well so it doesn't include the way to this component in the assembly the other thing that you need to do when created in place components in assemblies is we used to say we'll just click on the screen to sketch on the XY plane the problem we have these days is a lot of people are 3d connection manipulators and it's good practice now really to select the XY plane from the browser instead to place your first sketch you know then for sure that's on the XY plane otherwise you may have problems later on when you push this through to a 2d drawing and we've had instances where the view is not quite flat on the drawing view okay so let's MA drop our skeleton now in earlier presentations from Autodesk they used to show this as a 3d sketch I prefer to do it this way whereby we actually have fun just model up a rectangle meter by 500 mil I actually do or prefer to do is to actually create this as a solid so model your skeleton as a solid model instead it's a lot quicker than working with 3d sketches and we still have the ability of selecting the edges on this model to place our steel sections later on you've got any other braces or struts then you just add these are sketches on the faces the other thing I do on this is purely personal preference but I change this to glass so we've got some form of transparency on this skeleton and I always use black edges so there as well so there's there's a very simple meter long 500 by 500 block that I'm going to use as my skeleton for adding my steel profiles so actually assembly you need to save the assembly and then we go to the design tab the design ribbon unlisted sends us to the design wizards and we're going to be looking at the frame analysis section or the frame design section of this ribbon those of you on standard inventor won't have the frame analysis pattern here by the way there are other options for the frame generator from this pulldown I'll be looking at the beam and column calculator later on so all we do is we go to our insert frame member button we choose our standard so we want to work to we choose our family ie the section that we want to use this is just a list of standards you can use the up and down arrow to choose what you want in your get a preview on the screen here at the profile section Desai's the material and the color that you want to choose to use to add to these sections by the dartboard effect here enables you to align the either a corner the center or the middle of a face with an edge that we're about to select on the skeleton model I'm just going to for the ease of presentation today just use the center but we can then jog it backwards and forwards and also rotate it a mirror the steel section as well so for C profiles and set and so on this will be useful last but not least the placement by default it will place the member on the entire edge of the skeleton if you want to place it point-to-point then use the second button along so if I wanted to use any steel bracing standard steel section steel plate in other words I may want to put a short line or a couple of points on here so I can actually add a speak a piece of steel standard steel plate to my skeleton but still do it inside the frame generator and likewise things like if I've got tubes underneath phone forklifts and so on I could do the same sort of thing and then job them down or in into position using these tools here okay now for the Vox section I'm going to use the center to align with all the edges on the skeleton I'll do that very quickly but just as a tip really if you're add in other sections c-sections beams and so on then select the one edge first and place the section and then - and then get the alignment right by clicking on the relevant buttons here to align it correctly and then always move off from one end to a liner connect to the edge that you just selected and just move around and select individually two lines that are linked to the beam that you just selected the way that works then is it uses the alignment of the first edge to sort out the alignment on the second and third edges that you select your vise select this edge first and then go to that edge afterwards you won't get the alignment right on the second edge that I've selected so always move gently over from the first edge to edge is the selector that connects the first one and you'll get the alignment correct in this instance because on our right-click we've got things like multi select and chain selects and so on I can just literally rip window around the skeleton and add my box section immediately to the skeleton and populate it so there are two buttons down here that are important to talk about the first one is two prompts for the filename well what will happen is these steel sections will be given a random numbering scheme to create a part number for the steel section if we use the ISO description in this case as well as a to start of the file name if you actually want to be prompted for the file name yourself so you can put in your own part numbers to these then tick that box there the second one is relatively new this gets the frame members part number from the Center though this is actually very useful if you want to roll up standard lengths by sorry common lengths of steel sections so if I've got some box section that's all say our before these a metre long it'll roll these up into the parts list as for off a metre long as opposed to giving these all separate part numbers and obviously in the past this should just have one of each we're asked this all the time is quite useful to do this I would suggest you don't use that button if you're using invent a professional with the item master because that doesn't come through correctly at the moment okay so um it's all populated let's click on OK to populate the frame you will you will be asked for a sub assembly name and a location and the skeleton file name as well I would give these unique names based on the assembly that you're working on certainly if you use in the vault because if you using the vault and you've got a unique file name switched on then I would suggest you give these unique names based on the assembly even if it's just a matter of putting base under store underneath or something like that based on the assembly we're working on ok so that's the the Frank generator populated by the the actual end treatments I'm not going to worry about at the moment because I want to do the analysis first but one thing I would suggest you do is turn off the visibility of the skeleton in your assembly this really does help when you come to select faces inside the skeleton when you're starting to use miter and trim extend and so on ok let's say this [Music] [Music] and now we'll put this into a GAE no I've got I'll just start a blank assembly and we'll take this base assembly and just copy that and paste it into our GA okay now secondly I've got another sever somebody I want to place on here so if you just go to a place and put another sub assembly on here what I want to do is show you that we can actually work in multiple sub assemblies and the GA when we're working with them analysis software but there are certain things that you may have to do which I'll go through when we start running the analysis software itself okay let's assemble this together I'll use the new assemble tool this place away the the laborious ticking of options inside the constraint dialog box all we do is we select a face and then another face it drags the component on earth with a curse and as you select the first face or the first face or edge always select it on the moving part if I select another face I want it to flush to it'll determine that that is flush because of the orientation of the two faces and I can just accept that and that's it firsts immediately let's make these together so again assemble step the face we want to make from the face we're going to make two again it determines from the orientation that that's actually a mate another flush so finally we'll do a final flush between the two end faces here and about 500 sorry 250 FL okay so there's our assembly assembled using the new tools or just to say this and then we'll go into the frame analysis software itself now the frame analysis software is a subset of robots which was purchased by autodesk about three years ago it's a structural analysis package and they've incorporated a certain amount of it inside inventor professional if i go ahead and create a simulation you can see that i can actually create a static analysis or a modal analysis of the assembly mobile analysis is enables me to find the natural frequencies of my assembly there isn't frequencies such that if i've got say a motor attached to this assembly and it's running at a certain frequency then i don't want the assembly to vibrate it up the bits if the one of the natural frequencies is the same or close to that of the motor so i can design it out and rerun the analysis again so that's the idea of using the nodal analysis and this goes on to a static analysis I'll add some forces to the top of the assembly add some constraints to the bottom and have a look at the forces in the assembly itself this then runs through and loads up the robot software okay what you actually get is the the Centers of the beams are added as beam larping elements or lines on our 3d model and the lines themselves the Centers are then connected by nodes and the analysis is actually done on these lines it's not done as you would work with a 3d finite element analysis package it's all done on these beam elements here where the two assemblies connect we've actually got a rigid link here which connects the two nodes together so the forces are the one load one node is transferred to the force of the node below on the other side of the rigid link yellow arrow here you can just see is gravity which obviously in this case in the wrong directions the first thing we would do is we actually change gravity for that in the right direction okay and that someone for the materials so properties first we have up all the part all the frame members we've got all the receive the mechanical properties on the screen here which we can customize should we wish the centroid which is used for the beam elements and the geometry and all mechanical properties if you want to change the materials we can do it here so all the material of marble has moles still there's nothing to stop me customizing this and so right okay well let's select all these beams and change these two miles to stainless steel for instance let's put some fixed constraints on here so we'll select to the nodes and it just changed the sizes that you can see what's going on okay we'll add some fixed constraints to the model and then finally listen to an axial metric viewers would be easier to see there we go we'll add a continuous load we've got force continuous load of moments in this case I want to add a continuous load to the beam here we can give it a start and then magnitude we can also change the angle of attack of the force and so on either graphically on the screen or from the dialog box it's a block quicker doing this with dialog boxes so in the frame analysis settings it's a good idea to take off a heads-up display just tick box in the frame analysis settings that gives you a better and easier way of working bumping up the dialog boxes instead on the software okay so we've now got our loads who know but I constraints the gravities in the right place let's go and simulate this and the results are available to us as in finite element analysis software so we get prepare a color bar ticket we get our or our geometry coded all the beams coded all the forces the displacements and so on on the 3d model we have a look at the results it's got a normal stress a block and a maximum stress and then in the display ring for on the maximum value on the screen so I'm gonna power maximum stress we can also put on the local systems because when you look at the forces in X Y and Zed they're all in relationship to a local coordinate system on the beam you notice Ted is vertical on most of these but you have to be very careful when you're analyzing using forces in x y&z because it's all in relationship to these local coordinate systems so what I'm going to do here is sum of a displacement we've got quite a large displacement along the beam here eight and a half millimeters on there about so I want to change my design in and put a brace in peace in the in the bottom model here so what going to do is finish the analysis let's go back and edit the bottom frame assembly edit the original skeleton model and we're going to place the sketch on the side of this skeleton and just literally draw a line on the face of that skeleton finish that one let's turn it around gets on the other side and in this case I could use project geometry and project the line that I've drawn on the other side if we wait for the select next to come up the selection cycling inventor 2012 has been improved whereby you actually get a list of objects behind the cursor which you can actually select from this pulldown list it's a lot easier than the the the icons that used to have before and I've projected that across to this side of the sketch okay let's return back to the top of the assembly and go out and insert some more frame members to these sketch lines that we've drawn and then all we need to do now is go back to the frame analysis sorry to go back to the top level assembly clothes better pay this back to the frame analysis environments this loads up the previous analysis and what we need to do now is update this because the nodes we've got a we've got a an analysis let me just recently this because we've now got some vertical beams on here as well all be sorry struts that now adds a node to this vertical brace here onto the beam that's done along the top but what I may want to do is to is is add a rigid link between this node and halfway along this beam here to transfer forces from here down to this vertical piece here so I would add a custom mode for this beam if I edit that I can then change it to relative so it's half way along and then add my rigid link between these two nodes and likewise just do that to the other side and there now the final rigid link between these two and then I can go ahead and run my analysis again and then perhaps publish this calculate EML document for a full report I can choose what analyses are one for what results I want through to this report it's just taking all the screen grabs at the moment I'm a crate source of HTML document with all our equations results loads and so on in the in the report okay so that's the frame analysis finished just to have a quick look at the flame generator just to finish off if I take this bottom assembly here we would probably want to start to work on this analysis on this frame now we finished the analysis a lot of companies probably would want to just run and throw a quick and dirty frame generator model first do the analysis and then afterwards start to trim and extend a mitre to create the final design so just very quickly we'll just do some mitering on this you can put a weld gap distance in should you wish everything's color coded on the dialog box so we'll just add some miters and some trimming this is where it's useful to turn off the solid of the skeleton so you can actually pick inside as well you can multiple select as well so in trim extend we can actually select multiple frame members and another useful option to turn this round they do one more trim and then one that one useful option is what we call trim to frame wear that enables me to select two members and it does an extend and a trim all in one go and also with this you can shorten so if I've got like a plastic cap or something I want to place on the end I can actually shorten it by this distance as well so it does all the relevant trimming for us or cuts back by a certain distance so that's the frame starting to be tidied up once you've got the frame member trimmed then when you go to the villa materials you will get all the relevant cut lengths and the bill of materials that you can put out to your parts list in the drawing one last thing for those of you with standard inventor you'll be pleased to know that there is actually a beam and column calculator this doesn't need any any model loaded in the background all you do is you select a section put the sizes in give it a length got a bean calculation this is way put in your supports and loads or if I just go straight to the graph I can just literally move my supports because by default you get two supports in one load you can add extras in the bean calculator tab double click on this and just change the force and then we've got a complete set of bending moments angles deflection stresses and so on that we could actually put out again to a report this is single beam source strut but you can do this in standard inventor you don't need the inventor professional for this and finally if you wanted to provide proof of calculation to some to an external agency and if you go to help and staff and book if it is handle pipette comes with it calculate widget and proof of the formula used against these particular analysis that to be supplied with the results so also look at the frame generator analysis on frames what I've shown you is that we can a very simple use of the frame generator with a few tips and tricks I hope we've learned ways of setting up a frame generator we worked with sub assemblies we've used the frame analysis software we've modified the frame we've added custom nodes and links and we've looked to other other analysis options that we have available to us if we don't have inventor professional so thank you very much for attending have a nice weekend and hope to see you guys shortly there's another webcast next week we're moving on all the way up to Christmas and keep an eye out for emails on that and thank you very much for attending you

Channel: Dave Whiteley

Views: 59,200

Keywords: autodesk, Inventor, Frame, Generator, analysis

Id: GMd5b5abPoE

Length: 27min 38sec (1658 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 11 2011