SSA Blog

I attended my second Abaqus Regional User Meeting (RUM) last month and really enjoyed it. Did I understand it all; well honestly no, but I suspect that I wasn’t alone in that.

If you haven’t been to one before then I strongly recommend it. It may perceived as a 2 day jolly by certain management factions, and it certainly isn’t without its enjoyable moments, but there is huge professional and technical value to be had from a RUM. The fact that this was the 27^th backs that up.  

November’s webinar, “Metal Inelasticity modelling with Abaqus”, will be held on November 28^th at 10:30.

Metals and metal alloys such as aluminium, steel, cast iron or titanium alloys are some of the most commonly used materials in manufacturing mainly due to their ductility, malleability and high mechanical properties.

Such materials are characterised by complex inelastic behaviours such as plasticity that make their finite element modelling challenging.

We are really pleased to have Richard Craven from Pelamis Wave as our guest blogger, you can find information about Pelamis on our knowledge base. Thanks Richard, over to you.

When I was first learning programming languages at university, I found them very tedious. It seemed pointless performing a task in a language I didn’t really understand, to make something appear on the screen which would have been much quicker with a pen, paper and calculator. Programming was very frustrating; the wrong number of spaces, incorrect use of seemingly randomly distributed punctuation, cryptic and infuriating error messages, which would often helpfully tell you the error was located on a line 3 lines away from the actual error. I quickly decided programming was not for me.

Having to deal with a slow puncture on my wife’s car got me thinking about the altogether more complex subject of tyre modelling. Knowing that Abaqus is used widely in tyre development by many manufacturers I decided to look into it a bit more closely.

Simulation really has led to fewer physical tests and a faster turnaround in tyre development since its introduction in the 1980’s. Just like it should have.

Developments in Quasi-Static loading, tyre noise and vibration, steady state and transient rolling, as well as looking at tread wear and hydroplaning characteristics have been used to enhance the understanding of how tyres really work.