This example demonstrates the ability of the structural mechanics solver to compute the deformation of simple geometries exposed to external pressures and displacements.
The model consists of a steel spring with two steel rings on its ends. A pressure is applied to the upper ring, the lower ring is fixed. The deformation of the spring as well as strains and stresses within the system are computed.
The main part of the model is the spring, which is generated by sweeping of a circle with the radius of 0.5 mm along a spiral path. The latter has been generated by employing a macro "Linear Spiral Coil" (4 windings with the radius of 5 mm, the segmentation angle of 10 degrees). The material has been set to "Steel-1010", with Young's modulus of 205 GPa and Poisson's ratio of 0.29.
At each end of the coil a cylinder has been added, with the inner radius of 4.4 mm and the outer radius of 5.6 mm, height of 1.4 mm. The boolean operation "Add" has been employed to the both cylinders and the spring.
In order to simplify the generated mesh, the fast method has been selected for the surface mesh generation, which is generally recommended for complex structures. The normal tolerance has been set to 36 degrees, and the mesh enrichment has been turned off. Thus the number of elements in the resulting mesh could be significantly reduced without major changes in the solution results.
A zero displacement boundary has been assigned to the bottom face of the lower cylinder. A traction of (0,0,-1e-4) GPa has been applied to the top face of the upper cylinder, equivalent to a 384 g (13.6 oz) load.
The 2nd-order solver has been started without mesh refinement. The accuracy has been set to 1e-6, which is fully sufficient for this computation.
The distribution of displacements, stresses and strains is available under "2D/3D Results" directory of the navigation tree. The spring deformation can be visualized by choosing "Deformed Mesh" in subfolder "Displacements".