Working with ANSYS- How to make seperate elements rigid for mechanical simulation?

Zablorg

Hi all,

This might be considered a coursework question, insofar as I'm doing it as a student and not a professional, but it's less to do with homework type questions and more to do with software fiddling, so I thought I'd post it here. I apologize if it's not the right forum.

I've been given an assignment to simulate a gantry crane in ANSYS. The geometry is to be constructed by assigning appropriate cross-sections to line bodies, which act as the crane elements. As these elements require different cross-sections, I've needed to use "Add frozen" when generating them so that they don't merge into a single body of uniform cross-section.

Here's the complication; when I try to simulate this in Mechanical after applying constraints and forces, it fails, citing "small equation pivot solver terms". From some research I understand this to mean that the whole thing is under-constrained. And when I simulate the structure as a single line body (with only one cross-section, unfortunately), it works just fine, so the impression I get is that the individual elements I've created aren't connected to each other in any meaningful way.

I have of course looked into methods to manually join the appropriate elements, but none of my many attempts have been successful, and I have little understanding of which of the apparently numerous methods would be appropriate to use.

So my question is ultimately; Is there a standard way to generate a rigid structure out of several independent line bodies? To fuse touching structures into a single mass?

saokevivvie

Hi,
I just started using Ansys so I might just try and throw something out there.
Do you think it could be a contact problem? I suggest you look into that