Tuesday, March 8, 2011

PLOT and LIST 1st principal stresses do not match!!!

To apply the circular pressure load to the side of the volume I build a cylinder volume into the rectangular prism wall volume, then partition the two and then glue them together so they would interact when meshed. then I apply the pressure load to the cylinder circular area.
but because my wall is split into two sections and is no longer a rectangular prism because of the cylinder inside it which is glued I cannot do a hexahedral mapped mesh and i have to do a tetrahedral free mesh which is less accurate.
How can i apply this circular pressure to the side of my wall without chopping it into segments?





notice the tetrahedrals....










After I run my analysis and PLOT the contour results for the 1st principal stresses, I see SMX and SMN in the top left part of the contour screen GUI. But when i go into the results tree and select the LIST nodal solution for 1st principal stress the maximum and minimum 1st principal stress at the bottom of the list does not match my SMX and SMN in the GUI this is the case for other stress results.
Why is that???