Sping with zero lenght for Spindle bearing simulation

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Hello everyone,

I am just starting with a calculation in CalculiX and will soon need some special elements. So far, I have worked with Hyperworks at my previous company, but the licensing costs are too high for my new company. I am doing the preprocessing with Mecway. I want to simulate the main spindle of a lathe. For this, I need to connect the housing to the spindle shaft. In Hyperworks, I used two RBE3 elements (housing to center and spindle to center), each connected to a separate node with the same coordinates. The spring thus had a zero length and could be assigned a spring stiffness in all directions. Additionally, rotational stiffness of the bearing was applied to these nodes. Is this also possible with CalculiX?

I know not the easy model for starting but the project need it :slight_smile:

Thanks for your help

Steffen

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RBE3 is basically distributed coupling in Abaqus and CalculiX. However, it has some significant limitations in CalculiX so we usually advise using rigid body constraints instead (if you don’t mind them making the surfaces rigid). You could try with kinematic coupling constraints (RBE2) too.

You can also put two node spring elements (like SPRING2) between the REF NODES of these constraints. The rotational part will be tricky though - CalculiX doesn’t have “true” rotational DOFs and torsional springs. Here are some workarounds: Torsional Spring - SPRING2?

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The idea is simple. Attach a spring to the rot node.

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