Had a problem last week where a Load Cell broke in half during a high load (around 1MN) fatigue testing sequence.
Visual inspections indicates the crack had initiated from a small radii feature in the load cell body and propagated to the screw thread at the centre. Was away over the weekend but I wanted to check if there were stress concentrations at the end of the ram shaft that were more likely to blame. Is the perfect problem for a Quickfem – 2D axisymmetric model to check what is going on.
Made two features, using isotropic steel, fixed the (blue) load cell body to the ground and placed an arbitrary tensile load to the (grey) ram shaft. Model took < 5 mins to build and solves in 7 seconds on an iPhone 13. Varied a few different geometries to check for sensitivity. Looks like the visual inspection matches up!
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.