Physics Set-Up

Specify Material

Press Physics Region under Physics Definition, AIM should detect the body in question and highlight it. Now that we have the physics region defined, press next step and a dropdown menu should appear. Since the objective is now to select a material press Add > Physics Modeling > Material Assignment > Structural Steel. The entire object is now made of structural steel and we can add our other constraints.

Boundary Conditions / Forces

Once the material has been defined the pressure acting on both ends of the plate can be added. Go to Structural Conditions > Add > Pressure. Select the end of the plate face without the cut out and apply the appropriate pressure. The problem specifies that the pressure be 1E6 Psi but since AIM defaults pressure to compressive it must be negated in order to have a tensile pressure.

Next to Structural Conditions press Add > Support then select one of the cut sides as the location and the Type will be User Specified. Edit the Translation drop down menus until there is only one arrow going into our model and constrain the direction normal to the surface. A symmetric boundary condition implies that there is zero translation normal to the symmetry surface, and there is zero rotation about the two axes orthogonal to the symmetry surface. By constraining the normal direction to the symmetry surface this prevents both translation normal to the surface and rotation about the two orthogonal axes. In our problem we will setup three symmetry surfaces by constraining the normal directions for three surfaces as shown in the image below.

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