Verification and Validation

Now that we have our results, it is important that we check to see that our computational simulation is accurate. One possible way of accomplishing this task is comparing to the pre-calculations, as we did in the results section. Another way to check our results is by refining the mesh further. The smaller the elements in the mesh, the more accurate our simulation will be, but the simulation will take longer. To refine the mesh, look to the outline tree and click Mesh > Body Sizing Change the element sizing to .05 (half the size of the mesh we originally tried). The new mesh looks like this . It has twice as many elements as the original.

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ANSYS accurately predicts the regions and magnitudes of the strain concentrations in the direction with the greatest strains. It also accurately reports X-strain gauge values. The X-direction is also of more interest because it has higher strains. Even though the Y-direction did not have as close of a correlation, the discrepancy is believed to be due to the material properties of the bicycle crank. 

For more details on validation using digital image correlation, see Validation of ANSYS Workbench with DIC.doc.

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