Pre-Analysis & Start-Up

Pre-Analysis

Before we start with the tutorial, we need to define our goals and our setup, and what sort of simplifications we can make in our geometry.

First, we want to find the stress and deformation of the structure when it is at its greatest force. Due to the motion of the Telescope, the truss will have a maximum of 90 degrees of rotation, which we expect will have the greatest deformation and stress for the material.

Therefore, we will model the gravity at 90 degrees rotated to the model.

Image Added

Now, we wonder about the simplifications we can make in the model.  We notice that the truss bars can be modeled as beams, and so we will replace the solid geometries with line bodies with a cross-sectional area. This will reduce and simplify the model, decreasing the computational time while keeping the same validity.

Start-Up

For this tutorial, the Start-Up step is located at the start of the Geometry step. 

Engineering Data

For simplicity's sake, we will let our geometry be defined as Structural Steel.

Go to Step 2: Geometry

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