Static Fabricated Structures

Design & simulation solutions for static fabricated structures.

Accurately predicting behaviour under various loads and environmental conditions, ensuring durability and safety while optimising for cost and material efficiency – these are just some of the problems designers of static fabricated structures are faced with. LEAP provides various solutions to these problems, helping designers and engineers build safer structures quickly and efficiently.

Compliance with design codes & standards

Assessing superstructure compliance to country or industry design codes and standards is crucial to the design of fabricated structures. Manual code compliance checks using tools such as Excel, Python or Matlab to check individual structural member compliance can take a lot of time and is often error prone. Alternatively, basic tools such as SpaceGass or Strand 7 do not integrate into more advanced tools which allow for close detail checks.

In Ansys, a global beam, or beam and plate model is constructed for the superstructure which allows engineers to simplify the analysis while retaining accuracy and integration into advanced analysis. Automated structural member recognition and design code checks enable a fast, iteratable engineering cycle through automated reporting.

Checking connection strength and fatigue compliance

Once the superstructure is checked to be compliant, often engineers need to analyse a specific beam or plate connection for strength and fatigue purposes. This always requires FEA but often the submodel is not integrated/linked to the global model as described above, which results in the need to build a completely new simulation.

Through FEA submodeling techniques the engineer can use the global or superstructure model and integrate a submodel region where forces and moments are transferred on the submodel cutplane bounderies to the detail 2D or 3D FEA of a joint or connection before assessing it for compliance to design codes.

The video below provides a brief demonstration of how a continuous seam weld is created in Ansys. For more information on modelling welds with Ansys, visit our blog.

Machine Configuration, Wind Load and Load Case Combinations

Large structures such as cranes and port-side equipment have various machine configurations – for example boom angles, load lifting position, storm stowing configuration, etc. Each of these machine configurations needs to be assessed because the structural response to various load case combinations are different for each. This can be a tedious exercise consuming days or weeks of engineering time.

Through the clever use of simulation, this process can be semi-automated and streamlined with automated reporting attached which can highlight the worst case load combinations out of hunderds of combinations. This process not only saves time and money but also significantly decreases the risk of failure.

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