Fasteners In FEA Dynamics Simulation

November 14, 2016 | By CAPINC

How can you best simulate the dynamics response of a structure with a large number of screws
or bolted connections? It is often prohibitively expensive to represent all the hardware, and at
the highest level of fidelity, both in terms of set-up time, and also for the computational time.
This article lays out a strategy for getting the best answer you can in the fewest compute
iterations, then we delve into the tactics of accounting for the effect of each fastener.

Goals

First, lay out clearly what your goals for the FEA are. If you need to predict the stresses and
strains in the fasteners, or in the parts that are fastened, that is one thing. But if you are mostly
concerned instead with the product’s displacement responses – that is, the natural mode shapes,
the resonance frequencies, and the peak deflections – that is a different thing entirely.

Stress and strain are local properties of particular mesh elements, and they require care that the
mesh elements be small enough, have good aspect within themselves, and also in relation to
their neighboring elements. Careful meshing, and equally careful application of the
screwed/bolted contact conditions, mean that obtaining accurate stress and strain results will
always be rather slow.

Displacement response, however, is a property of the aggregate structure. Certainly it is the

So reporting of stresses and strains is all about singling out only the most problematic elements.
And reporting of Displacements is effectively allowing every element a ‘vote’, so that the
outlier elements have far less of an effect. The good news is that displacement-based FEA
problems can be solved faster, with fewer mesh elements, and less effort going into the Fastener
boundary conditions – and still retain good accuracy. Also, you can solve faster, and use less
space on the hard-drive, by telling the solver to ONLY compute the displacements, but not to
bother computing stresses or strains. Figure 1, below, shows the dialog for editing the
RESULTS for both a Linear Dynamic study (left), and a Nonlinear study, (right).

Solver

Users that have access to SOLIDWORKS Simulation Premium, have two available solvers for
dynamics problems. By far, the faster of these two is the Linear Dynamics study. Certainly, any
kind of dynamics study is going to be non-linear (in time), so the word linear in this study type,
refers to the fact that the stiffness matrix of the problem, must be linear. That means no
nonlinear materials like rubber, and also no nonlinear boundary conditions, like a sliding
contact.
 Figure 1: Displacement-only studies can opt to run smaller and faster

This second limitation is probably the greatest strategic consideration, for representing
hardware. If you want to use the bolt connector at all, because you want to take into account
bolt pre-load for instance, then your final study must use the nonlinear solver, mostly because
the bolt connector must always be used in conjunction with a no-penetration contact set. Also,
incidentally, it is because there’s a structure’s dynamics response is shifted, non-linearly, by
pre-loads and other background stresses.

Figure 2: Two solver choices for Vibration problems

If you are ultimately going to be running a study using the Non-Linear solver, with fast-acting
dynamics, and bolt connectors/contacts, then you will certainly want to lighten-up the study
anywhere else that you can, to get answers in a reasonable time. Which is why, before I set up
and run such a study, I will certainly have run perhaps a dozen or more simpler, faster test cases
beforehand.

Strategy

In any structural vibration problem, my first goal is to learn as much as I can, quickly and
cheaply. Then I’ll add detail and pay the performance hit for finer accuracy, only in the specific
regions of the model that preliminary studies have pointed to as areas of interest. As I feel my
way along in the problem, I’ll discover which levels of mesh refinement, which types of
boundary condition, are best suited to my goals, and all lessons learned will be gathered into
the final, “for-the-numbers” study. At CAPINC we call this “spiraling in toward the bull’s eye”.

In my first prelim study, what is the cheapest possible way to fasten together plates or sheet
metal? The rigid connector, of course. In figure 3 below, we have an electrics enclosure that
is configured to have all hardware removed. In their place, I have added Split Line features that
occupy the same footprint that the bolt head or washer/nut would have covered. The base and
the cover are sheet metal parts, and so will mesh as shells. But, the rigid connector treatment
will work just as well if the fastened bodies are meshed as solid. The rigid connector will
enforce that these pairs of faces will remain perfectly planar and rigid – but, unlike a “fixed”
relation, they are allowed to ‘float’ in space as needed to follow the large-scale flexure of the
cover and base.

Figure 3: Split-line features facilitate using rigid connectors in place of hardware

What about all of the other surface area where the two main parts lap over? If we allow them
to bond, then they will have much higher aggregate stiffness. If we set our Global Contact type
to be “Allow Penetration”, then some flexure modes will be allowed where the two plates pass
thru each other, and our net stiffness will be too low. Clearly, the most accurate way to represent
this situation, ultimately, is with a no-penetration contact set. But for a preliminary study, the
lesser of all evils, is to allow the plates to interfere, rather than allowing them to bond.

This will make our vibrational frequencies report lower, and our deflection predictions will be
more conservative, than a bonded contact would be. In fact, most parts are machined with
tolerances to permit assembly. If there is even so little as 0.005” clearance between the yellow
cover and the gray base, pictured above, before the screws are applied, then the initial stiffness
response of the structure will indeed be the lower stiffness of the individual plates, contacting
only beneath the bolt/washer footprint. Even when the faces are bowed into intimate contact
under extreme bending, the bending stiffness will be closer to the two walls’ stiffness, summed,
rather than quadrupled (as if bonded).

Mass And Stiffness

The rigid connector is not the only short-cut to representing fasteners, but I’ll usually try these
first, everywhere, and then examine the stresses and deflections to see which fasteners will be
the most interesting or problematic. Even if my ultimate goal is NOT to apply a stress or strain
criteria, I’ll still look at strain, and (elemental) stress, to see which of my rigid connectors are
in need of more accurate treatment. And, there ARE some more tricks we can apply. So, what
are the weaknesses of the rigid approach?

Without the fasteners, our mass will be too low, for one thing. But here’s a lucky break;
although the software will usually NOT allow you to put two boundary conditions or loads onto
a single face, it turns out, you CAN apply a distributed mass to a face, even if that face already
supports a rigid connector.

The two studies pictured in Figure 4, below, are the same study, cloned, but the second study
has the mass of the screw/washers/nut added to the outer face of each rigid connector pair. The
added mass has the expected effect, of lowering the natural frequency and increasing
displacements. But we can also see, in this example, that the gain in accuracy is only around
two percent.
 Figure 4: Mass of removed hardware can be added back on via a distributed mass

The second weakness of the rigid connector, is that it can be too…. well, rigid. It credits the
contact areas under the fastener head, with being infinitely stiff. This will reinforce the elements
immediately adjacent to the connector, too, resulting in slightly higher frequencies, and
(usually) lower displacements. What can we do about this?

In only those fasteners that are attracting the highest strains and stresses, I would delete those
rigid connectors, and replace them with a bonded contact set. The bonded contact will take
longer to mesh, and slightly longer to run – especially if you need turn on mortar bonding (for
higher accuracy in a non-compatible mesh). But, the bonded elements retain much more of their
parent-material compliancy, meaning, a softer joint. Stresses in the immediate vicinity will
likely be less singular.

Why didn’t we just use the bonded contact in the first place for every fastener? Meshing speed
is certainly one reason. But there’s a deeper, tactical reason the rigid connector is preferred. A
rigid connection can be applied between sets of faces, that do not touch, do not even need to be
parallel, or indeed, anywhere near each other. They work reliably regardless of your part
tolerances, assembly clearances, despite disparities in plate thickness, regardless of whether
your SHELL definition is on an inside face, outside face, or mid-surface. I wish I could say the
same for the bonded contact condition. But I’m sure you’ve already discovered, that to BOND
two surfaces in the FEA, the CAD faces have to lie within certain tolerances of adjacency, or
at least, of overlap. So it is not worth fighting that battle for EVERY fastener, only to find out,
that only a handful of fastener locations are really of interest.

Bonded Variation

Here is a time saving trick that I see used a lot by the SOLIDWORKS support staff, and you’ll
see this in most of their FEA tutorials. Where two parts are through-bolted, they will sometimes
only model holes in the top or outside plate, and not bother to model the holes on the inner
plate. Then the bonded contact set is applied between the EDGE of the outer hole, and the
FACE of the underlying plate. In the case of solid meshing, this can save a little time, since you
don’t need to mesh/resolve half the holes. And also, you don’t need to create the split line
features to isolate the area under the screw head. But in the case of sheet metal and surfaces,
meshed as Shells, I find that the software does not like to BOND an edge to an edge. The edge-
to-face bond then becomes not just an effort-saving trick, but also a necessity. To get the edge-
to-face bond to work, you actually MUST remove the holes from one of the two plates. This
treatment is so prevalent among the SOLIDWORKS tutorial and training examples, I tend to
believe that it is a hold over practice from an earlier time when our Mortar Bonding option did
not exist. My own preference is to create the split line features for the head/nut area, in every
case – perhaps that is my hold over habit?

Figure 5, below, is the setup of the part from Lesson 2, “Electronic Enclosure” of the Simulation
Dynamics training class. I reference it here because you can go to the SOLIDWORKS User
Portal, log in, and download this training set yourself, and look over their study set-up. It also
illustrates the edge-to-face bonding approach, even though the dialog windows show a face-to-
face selection. Because the faces were selected on sheet metal parts, and these will ultimately
mesh as shells, not solids, and so the screw-hole face selection will become an edge of the mesh.
 Figure 5

Standoffs

In a special case, where a screw or post or PEM stud is serving as both a fastener, and as a
standoff, you have a special case that lies neatly between the two tricks I’ve outlined above.
That is, a rigid connector” would work fine, no matter what the standoff distance was – but it
would be too stiff. The longer a standoff is, the lower its net spring-stiffness should be. Even if
you can get the bonded contact to work across the larger distance, it, too, will be too stiff. How
can we de-tune this?

In most of these cases, where you have flat, parallel faces to connect, you can use a spring
connector. This connector type is much like a rigid connector, except that you can then soften
it by applying an axial, and transverse spring stiffness. The axial stiffness will be really high.
It’s just the Young’s Modulus of the material, multiplied by the shank cross-sectional area, and
then divided by the effective spring length. The shear stiffness is trickier: you can build a quick
CAD model of the part, fix one end, apply a (small) unit of lateral deflection on the other end,
and then measure the resulting reaction force. The transverse stiffness that you enter in the
spring dialog will just be this reaction force, divided by the applied lateral deflection. Since we
don’t care how much of that is shear, and how much is bending, it is quicker to do this in the
CAD, than it is to try deriving this by hand with pencil and paper.

I mention this use of the spring connector, for something that is not really a spring, mostly to
encourage you to think outside the box. A spring connector can sometimes be thought of as a
pin connector, but with tunable stiffness. But more often, I’m working with cases where stand-
offs are relatively few, and it is best to leave them represented in the assembly and mesh as
solid. And in that case, you tie them into the PCB or into the sheet metal with a bonded contact,
on the flat ends. Or, on the circular edges where the standoff might pass through a board, use a
rigid connector.

Getting To Final Numbers

The tricks outline above will get you at least ¾ of the way to final results. If you are analyzing
a structure for stiffness and not for stresses, and you don’t have any non-linear materials,
elastomers, or gap/contact elements, you can stick to the linear dynamics solver and get your
answers rather quickly. If you are solving instead (or also) for stress, especially, for stress within
the fasteners, then you’ll need to review the stresses in the immediate area of your bonded or
rigid connectors, and identify the handful of them that are of greatest concern. In only these
locations, you will do one of two things:

• Re-instate the CAD models of the fasteners, so that you can mesh them as solid
elements, or;
• Use a bolt connector in place of the rigid/bonded treatment, so that you can include
contact effects, pre-load stress, and get a full report card on the fastener stresses. This
method, of course, requires that you re-define the study using the nonlinear solver.

Taken together, these tricks should get you to accurate predictions, while taking up the least
set-up time, putting the most detail into only those areas where you need it, for efficient meshes
and faster solution times.