Creating Clamps

Clamps are restraints applied to surface or curve geometries, for which all points are to be blocked in the subsequent analysis.

means that there is no translation degree of freedom left in that direction.

Clamp objects belong to Restraint objects sets.

Make sure you fixed all the global degrees of freedom of your assembly, otherwise a global singularity will be detected at the time of the Static Computation (such a model is unsolvable). To allow you to easily correct the model (Static Analysis Cases only), the singular displacement of the assembly will be simulated and visualized after computation.

Clamps can be applied to the following types of Supports:

Mechanical Feature	Geometrical Feature				Analysis Feature
Mechanical Feature	Point or Vertex	Curve or Edge	Surface or Face	Volume or Part	Analysis Feature
					virtual part

This task shows how to create a Clamp on a geometry.

You can use the sample02.CATAnalysis document from the samples directory for this task: a Finite Element Model containing a Static or Frequency Analysis Case.

Before You Begin:
Go to View -> Render Style -> Customize View and make sure the Shading, Outlines and Materials options are active in the Custom View Modes dialog box.

1. Click the Clamp icon

.
The Clamp dialog box is displayed.

2. You can change the identifier of the Clamp by editing the Name field.

3. Select the geometry support (a surface, an edge or a virtual part). Any selectable geometry is highlighted when you pass the cursor over it.

You can select several supports in sequence, to apply the Clamp to all supports simultaneously.
Symbols representing a fixed translation in all directions of the selected geometry are visualized.

4. Click OK in the Clamp dialog box to create the Clamp.

A Clamp object appears in the features tree under the active Restraints objects set.

	You can either select the support and then set the Clamp specifications, or set the Clamp specifications and then select the support.
	If several Analysis Cases have been defined in the Finite Element Model, you must activate a Restraints objects set in the features tree before creating a Clamp object.
	Restraints are required for Stress Analysis computations. They are optional for Modal Analysis computations (if not created, the program will compute vibration modes for the free, unrestrained part).
	Clamp objects can be edited by a double click on the corresponding object or icon in the specification tree.

Make sure the computation is finished before starting any operation.

Products Available in Analysis Workbench

The ELFINI Structural Analysis product offers the following additional features with a right mouse click (key 3) on a Clamp object:

Restraint visualization on mesh: the translation of your Clamp object specifications into solver specifications can be visualized symbolically at the impacted mesh nodes, provided the mesh has been previously generated via a Compute action.

Right-click your clamp object and select the Restraint visualization on mesh option.

Generate Image: generates an image of the computed Restraint objects (along with translating all user-defined Restraints specifications into explicit solver commands on mesh entities), by generating symbols for the nodal restraints imposed by the Restraints objects set. The image can be edited to include part or all of the options available.

Right-click on a Restraints objects set and select the Generate image option. The Image Choice dialog box is displayed. You can select images by clicking them in the list.

The resulting images sequence is obtained by superposition.

Report: the partial status and results of intermediate pre-processor computations are reported in HTML format. It represents a subset of the global Report capability and generates a partial report of the Restraints objects set Computation.

Click the Basic Analysis Report icon on the bottom toolbar.
The .html partial report file is displayed.