Product: Abaqus/CAE
Benefits: Abaqus/CAE now offers assembled fasteners as a tool for efficient and realistic modeling of complex connections. This feature allows you to create a template model of the fastener-like construct and to instance the template at any number of attachment points in your main model. The assembled fastener capability simplifies modeling in any system containing large numbers of fasteners such as bolts, rivets, or screws.
Description: Fasteners allow the modeling of point-to-point connections between parts. In Abaqus/CAE, assembled fasteners can be used to model complex behaviors for bolts, rivets, screws, and other types of connectors. For a large system such as an airframe or automobile, assembled fasteners allow you to define the fastener template once, then assign it many times in the main model.
Assembled fasteners are different from point-based (mesh-independent) and discrete fasteners in Abaqus/CAE. Assembled fasteners do not create individual fastener objects like point-based and discrete fasteners, but instead they allow you to replicate fastener-like behavior in many places. Using the assembled fastener technique, you can read in connector and constraint behaviors from a template model and assign these attributes in multiple locations in your main model. The template fastener attributes are aggregated in the input file generated by Abaqus/CAE, to help you manage models containing large numbers of assembled fasteners. Figure 4–5 illustrates how the template model is replicated and assigned in the main model.
The overall process for building assembled fasteners is as follows:
Build the template model containing your fastener-like construct: connector section assignments, tie constraints, coupling constraints, adjust points constraints, and solid or beam section assignments.
Develop your main model, placing attachment points at the locations where you want the template fastener to be replicated. The template model control point will be mapped onto the locations of the attachment points in the main model (see Figure 4–5).
Working in your main model, use the Create Fasteners and Edit Fasteners dialog boxes to define how the template model will be read in, assembled, and oriented.
Optionally, use property generation scripts to modify the properties copied into the main model from the template model. Multiple property generation scripts can be used with the same template model to achieve different results in separate assembled fastener objects. For example, you could use two scripts to apply different materials to the same fastener template. You can use the Abaqus Scripting Interface to write your property generation scripts; see “Creating and running your own scripts,” Section 9.5.4 in the Abaqus/CAE User's Manual, and the Abaqus Scripting User's Manual.
Figure 4–6 shows the Edit Fasteners dialog box used to create new assembled fasteners.
Interaction module: SpecialFasteners
