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Homework Exercise

Critiquing computer results is an important engineering skill. To help you develop this "critical thinking" skill, this problem presents you with an ANSYS solution and asks you to critique it. Enjoy!

A steel plate of width, w=0.25m, of length L=12m, and of density 7.9x10³kg/m³ is hung vertically from the ceiling. A force, F=10050N is applied as shown in the figure below. The thickness is 1mm. 

The plate is so thin that there is no significant stress variation through the thickness. Gravity effects may be significant.

You can download our ANSYS FEA solution to this problem by clicking here. Load this into ANSYS Workbench as in the tutorial. Please determine if this ANSYS solution is correct. If the solution is not right, use paper-and-pencil calculations to predict what the right values should look like.  Justify your answer through quantitative reasoning. . Double-click on Results in Workbench to bring up the FEA results that have been calculated already.

Image Added

You should see the following results under Solution:
*Displacement
*sigma_y (i.e. σ_y)
*sigma_x (i.e. σ_x)

You might need to change the units for the results display by selecting Units > Metric (m, kg, N, s, V, A).

1. Look at the Displacement plot. From this plot, deduce if the model is constrained properly. Show your reasoning.

2. Does the sigma_y variation look right? Use analytical reasoning to justify your answer.

3. Does the sigma_x variation look right? Use analytical reasoning to justify your answer.

4. From the above 4 items, can you tell if the ANSYS model provided to you has probably been set up correctly? If there is an error in the set up, what might it be?

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