design of a container and fem analysis with inventor

[Silviettina]

Bye to all,

are mechanical engineering student, for an exercise of an examination is required design of a water tank of 3000 liters made of ribbed steel, and filled with water, and subsequent study of efforts with finite elements.

the software I know to use is inventor professional 2010, something like you can do with this program? the results are for teaching purposes only.

if you can do it, I kindly ask you to give me advice on how to act:

1- the first problem will be the design of the tank. is it possible to draw a full solid and then empty it leaving the desired thickness?

2- Can you calculate the volume of empty space within a tank?

3- Is the ribbed steel a material available in the inventor's library?

4- Can someone give me some tutorials or explain what I have to do to set a fem verification by simulating the tank filled with water? the effort is hydrostatic and is distributed throughout the surface, it is a distributed effort but the resulting is defined... How can I set this thing?

The more advice you can give me and the more grateful I am, our trainer is always too busy to give us a hand, if I waited for her I would not end by the end of June.

a greeting and a thank you to anyone in any way should or want to help me:=)

 

[diegus]

As inventor is not a specific fem solutor, the thing you can do but you have to be careful about what you do and how you interpret the result.

First of all the material: in the style editor you can create a custom material with the characteristics of the steel you want to use.

the reservoir can create it as emptying a solid of revolution or drawing the thickness directly into the sketch and then making the revolution (I prefer emptying).

the internal volume calculations so: see the full cylinder volume (in iproperties), empty the cylinder and see the volume (update the iproperties). make the difference (the volume you read in iproperties is the net volume of model material.

We pass to the fem, first of all you have to understand how to bind your tank. drawing of the feet of the tank and binding them to the ground seems a good thing to me.

the forces, here comes the beautiful.. .
You can use the pressure on the whole internal face, but it wouldn't be okay because it would be constant on all the tank and on all faces. in a tank instead the pressure increases as you descend (the weight of the liquid itself) and on the upper face you have no strength.
I solve this: I divide the inner face of the lawn into many equal horizontal bands and to each of these branches a growing pressure. How much? This is for you to calculate it.

Now it seems enough if you have questions... .