Interesting and Insightful COSMOSWorks answers, Part II

In Part I of our multi-partseries on COSMOSWorks Q-n-A, we covered three questions pertaining to Frequency Studies.  This time around, I'd like to handle a few more questions involving Buckling studies and "soft springs."

1. What can COSMOSM or GeoStar handle for Buckling that COSMOSWorks can't? The good news is that all products can handle both linear and non-linear buckling scenarios. The user must choose the correct material model for each case.
2. Can Slenderness Ratios and Euler Numbers be retrieved from the results of a Buckling study? COSMOSWorks does not report back these values but they can be calculated by hand.
3. When "soft springs" are used to stabilize a model, can the reaction forces on these "springs" be retrieved?  No; the soft springs are additional qualities to the stiffness calcs being performed. But with all static studies ran with COSMOSWorks, the user can retrieve and list the reaction forces and moments for selected items or the entire model. This is a great, quick check to ensure that your model is balanced and truly.... static. (Right-mouse click the Results folder and select List Reaction Forces)

In our next installment, we'll wrap things up with questions involving meshing, pin connectors, and beam elements.

Comments

[Bill McEachern]

a couple comments:

on 1) There are three types of buckling: linear, non-linear and post buckling. CosmosWorks Adv Pro will do linear and Post but not Non-linear. Geostar will do all three. Non-linear buckling is obtained by loading a structure in a static study and then taking the resulting stiffness matrix and doing a linear buckling analysis (eigenvalue extraction) on it - you get the buckling margins of the loaded and deformed structure.

On 2) Slenderness ratio is a geometric property and the Euler number is the number of waves or half waves to which the srtucture is buckled - they are visible by inspection form the modes shape plots for applicable structures.
On 3) Assuming this means when the solver option is set to apply soft springs: if you manually apply soft springs using the elastic support option under the connector selections you can then get the reactions for specific stabalization schemes.