James Lank
ANSYS Course Project
As one of my technical electives I've decided to take a course on FEA. Here's a look at the final course project the group and I are working on - an integrated bar and stem part for a mountain bike!
For the final project of my CAD course, the group and I elected to design a handle bar and stem system and solve for deflection, VM stresses, and stress concentrations. To increase the level of difficulty to match course standards, we decided to integrate the stem and bars to get a better stress estimation and visualization.
This course goes into great detail on the theory behind FEA/FEM in addition to practical applications using ANSYS. The primary modeling method used in this course is bottom-up modeling, however top-down modeling was also covered but was not used in this project. Getting a deep and thorough understanding of the bottom-up modeling approach and the commands and process used in ANSYS is a great tool to have in my engineering toolbox. The team encountered some issues with refining the mesh and convergence during the optimization process but after exercising our ability to breakdown complex problems and use the resources at hand, we managed to create an optimized model and generate good solutions for deflection and stress.
