Loads & Boundary Conditions

With Constraints, Loads, Moments, Gravity and Pressure Boundary Conditions can be created which are required for the optimisation.

Displacement Constraints:

Displacement constraints can be applied to geometries. By default the displacement constraint locks the translation in all three directions. Individual degrees of freedom can be deselected. The rotational degrees of freedom will be always locked.

Geometries on which a displacement constraint is applied become automatically a Non-Design Space.

Force-Moment:

Forces and Moments can be applied to any Geometry (Volume/Surface).

With this direct application of a force/moment the point of load-application will be in the centre of gravity for volumes and in the centre of surfaces for surfaces. That means that the force/moment is applied of the midpoint of the chosen volume/surface/edge.

Remote Application

Moreover, Remote Loads can be applied. The point of load-application can be placed manually and more than one geometry can be chosen as the impact area.

All forces and moments can be applied on volumes, surfaces, edges and points. Please be aware, that when a boundary condition is applied on a surface/edge/point only this will be automatically a Non-Design Space. In most cases a bigger Non-Design Space is needed, which should be created separately or the boundary condition needs to be applied on a volume.

The image below shows that with Non-Design Spaces on the left the functional areas that are important for the post processing are completely available. On the right side only the surfaces were used as load/constraint application points and no post processing after additive manufacturing is possible.

Gravity (Acceleration):

An acceleration can be created by defining a magnitude for a direction. More than one acceleration can be created per optimisation however only one acceleration per load case makes sense.

The acceleration only affects the Design Space and doesn’t need to be applied on a volume or surface!

Attention: If only an acceleration and no other load is defined in a model, the optimisation will get rid of the whole material iterative. The acceleration force is directly dependent on the volume of the Design Space. As the Design Space is reduced so is the acceleration force until no material is left.

Pressure Load:

Pressure loads can be applied only on surfaces. It doesn’t matter if the surface is plane or not. The Pressure magnitude is the only value which is required. The chosen surface will automatically become a Non-Design Space.