Hi,
I’m working on a wing on which I am trying to apply a shear and moment on the end of the wing. My mesh is made with S6 elements. Does anyone have any input on the best way for this to be done?
You can use a rigid body constraint to easily apply forces and moments to whole surfaces (or actually node sets).
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Thanks for the reply! I was reading the manual a bit more, do you know what the difference is between using rigid bodies as you said and simply applying a moment (using *CLOAD) to a given set of nodes?
*RIGID BODY constrains the motion of the selected nodes to the motion of a single reference node (or actually two: REF NODE and dummy ROT NODE used to control the rotations). This way you can easily apply forces, moments and boundary conditions to whole surfaces. Their nodes won’t be able to move relative to each other so the surface will be made rigid though.
*CLOAD is just a concentrated force or moment load applied to the selected node. Each node gets the specified value of the load so you would have to apply a proper portion to achieve a certain total load on a surface.
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For shell elements the moment can be applied to separate nodes with *cload
For example:
*cload
Nset,5,-0.234
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