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Workflow for a project: Structural analysis (Read 1407 times)
Badboidave
Workflow for a project: Structural analysis
Sep 26th, 2009, 2:43am  
Hi,

Starting out a project and would like to hear your recommendations for a workflow method.

1) Basis premise of Idea: design simple geometry such as a cube or pyramid

2) Apply dynamics to it such as wind (force and magnitude)

3) analyse that force imposed onto each edge of the geometry

What is the best method to find the Imposed axial force on each edge of the geometry.  Ideally, I want to avoid doing component based calculations because I want it flexible - perhaps the shapes to be analyzed will be a cube, pyramid, or octahedron.....etc

Is there a way to write a script in Processing - export the geometry to an external Structural Analysis program and re-import the calculations in real time back to processing (wind changing force + magnitude)

The idea is to use Arduino in the end to accept the script and execute a set of actions.

Thanks for any tips
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yconst
Re: Workflow for a project: Structural analysis
Reply #1 - Sep 26th, 2009, 1:04pm  
Hello there,

you have to be a little more specific with what you want to achieve: is it a physics simulation like a game? is it a program to aid structural design in some way? What will it's input be?

also, what is the physical nature of the geometry you want to use? Is it a solid shape? is it a frame of sorts? The forces acting upon each geometry are quite different.

applying a force like wind can be a little bit tricky: The complexity of your model depends on the level of realism you want to achieve. In the simplest case, the magnitude of the wind acting on a surface depends on its angle towards the wind direction. The more parallel the less force it receives.

I;m not really pro with structural analysis/finite element/etc, but it could be possible that you could perform a one-time analysis of your geometry in an external program and then cache it to use it in your app/script.

I hope any of those help!

Gian Chatz
http://prototy.blogspot.com
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Yiannis Chatzikonstantinou
volatile prototypes
 
wmacfarl
Re: Workflow for a project: Structural analysis
Reply #2 - Sep 29th, 2009, 7:47pm  
My understanding is that this stuff is pretty computationally intensive -- you may know more than I, but I doubt that you're going to be able to get realtime results outputting to and inputting from any engineering quality discrete element analysis software, unless you have very few elements.  Am I wrong here?

For realtime analysis there are the game physics engines -- (jBullet and odejava are the two that I know of that are pretty easy to use in Processing) which "feel"/"look" right but I wouldn't trust as the final guiding principle for engineering a structure.
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gll
Re: Workflow for a project: Structural analysis
Reply #3 - Oct 12th, 2009, 5:58pm  
Fluid Dynamics in real time? Wo...

It is CPU intensive! Discrete Element Methods are known to be intense calculations. This is why they usually are more than happy with F0RTRAN (see ANSYS). But to get something that looks like (without accurate forces calculations), then there many alternatives. Traer's Library is very good. For Rigid bodies, you have ODE for JAVA. If you need something more accurate, you may export to ANSYS. I'm working on library to do it (basically 3dObject.toAnasys() is implemented). I'm using it, but since you need to distribute your calculation, we get something like .1 fps (which is very good for us).

*note: F0RTRAN is not FORTRAN
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