Substructure Analysis Automation and Advancements in Workbench Mechanical

Substructure analysis is a model reduction technique to reduce the computational cost of dynamic analysis involving high number of degrees of freedom. Substructure analysis in Workbench Mechanical includes several features to enhance the user experience. 1. Incorporating the pre-stress effects is a vital step in studying the dynamic characteristics of a system. Substructure analysis can include the stress stiffening effect from an upstream Static Structural analysis using the Pre-stress object. Pre-stress substructure analysis can also be scoped only to a few bodies of interest (beta feature). 2. Using Imported Condensed Part object, one can include previously generated superelement into an analysis in conjunction with non superelement bodies. These superelements are connected to the rest of the model via master degrees of freedom which is called an interface. Named selections are used to create these nodes on interfaces, which get cleaned when the user clears the mesh or reimport a condensed part. In 2024 R1 release, this limitation is overcome by re-associating to the previously created Named Selections. This feature is crucial for design point study as it does not require any user intervention to re-associate the scoping information. 3. Generation of superelements can also include nonlinear contact elements between the bodies. Since substructure generation is a linear analysis, contact elements’ stiffness is calculated based on their initial status and does not change during the solution. 4. Multiple load vectors can be grouped and applied as a single load vector during the generation pass. Substructure analysis also supports Imported Pressure load vector (both Real and Imaginary) and Imported Body Temperature load vector generation from external data. 5. The work is underway to generate superelements with Cyclic Symmetry. The present work is aimed at highlighting these advanced features of Substructure analysis in Workbench Mechanical.