Creating Surface Sliders

Surface Sliders are surface constraint joins, which allow points of a surface to slide along a coinciding rigid surface.

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

Surface Sliders are applied to surface geometries. Surface Slider 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.

At each point of the deformable surface, the program automatically generates a constraint which fixes the translation degree of freedom in the direction normal to the surface at that point.

Surface Slider 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

This task shows how to create a Surface Slider on a surface.

You can use the sample15.CATAnalysis document from the samples directory for this task: a Finite Element Model containing a Static or Frequency Analysis Case and computed corresponding Solution.

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 Surface Slider icon

.
The Surface Slider dialog box is displayed.

2. You can change the identifier of the Surface Slider by editing the Name field, if needed.

3. Select a geometry support (a face).

You can select several supports in sequence, to apply the Surface Slider simultaneously to all. Symbols representing the Surface Slider are displayed on the support.

4. Click OK in the Surface Slider dialog box to create the Surface Slider.

A Surface Slider object appears in the specification tree under the active Restraints objects set.

	You can either select the geometry support and then set the Surface Slider specifications, or set the Surface Slider specifications and then select the geometry support.
	If several Analysis Cases have been defined in the Finite Element Model, you must activate a Restraints objects set by clicking it in the features tree before creating a Surface Slider 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).
	Surface Slider objects can be edited by a double click on the corresponding object or icon in the features tree.

Make sure the computation is finished before starting any of the following operations.

Products Available in Analysis Workbench

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

on a Surface Slider object:

Restraint visualization on mesh: the translation of your Surface Slider 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.

on a Restraints objects set:

	`Generate Image`: generates an image of the computed Restraint objects (along with translating all user-defined Restraints specs 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.
	`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.

See Creating Clamps for more details.