Engineering stories, methods, and ideas.
Practical work from simulation, physical testing, data, automation, and the decisions that connect them.
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Class Notes
Recently, I was teaching a class for Black & Decker, and one of the students, Kevin, was taking notes that I thought captured my lecture quite well. I …
2007 Japan LS-DYNA Conference Summary By Sven Holcombe
Sven Holcombe of JARI sent us this great presentation summary that covers some of the paper presentation at the 2007 Japan LS-DYNA Conference. Its has been …
Membrane Thinning in Shell Elements
In 2D shell elements, the stress in the normal (fiber) direction is iteratively reduced to zero to meet the plane-stress condition. The strains are however …
Eliminating Contact Force Interference in Spotweld Forces Using SPOTTHIN in *CONTROL_CONTACT
In mesh independent deformable spotwelds (see here ), the actual spotwelds are represented using either beams or solids (single or cluster). The nodes of …
Shell Element Stress and Strain Output to D3PLOT – A Brief Overview
A few questions recently from some users while teaching a class prompted me to write this overview regarding the data output, particularly for shell …
Contact and Global Timestep
You may have seen this popular message that is printed out by LS-DYNA for every simulation. The LS-DYNA time step size should not exceed 0.456E-06 to avoid …
Blog Statistics – Thank You!
Just wanted to post some stats (courtesy http://www.statcounter.com) we gathered for the blog. It has been extremely gratifying that readers come back to …
Makefile – Is This Just for Programmers?
Recently, I have been assembling models outside of any pre-processors and found that the use of Makefile can often be very helpful in putting together …
Coverage of Japan LS-DYNA Conference – Courtesy Sven Holcombe
I am glad to write that Sven Holcombe from Japan will be providing us a brief first-hand coverage of the Japan LS-DYNA Conference that is going to happen …
Subsystem Swapping Made Easy with *SET_NODE_GENERAL, *SET_SEGMENT_GENERAL, and *INCLUDE_TRANSFORM
In web technology, it is a common practice to build applications that “share nothing”. For example, if a web application is running on a web server, and …
iPhone Support
This blog is now optimized for viewing on iPhones.
Strains and Stress in NonLinear Finite Element Method
Came across this nice document that talks about the strains and stress computations used in many nonlinear finite element codes. If you know the author of …