Update On Visual Analysis

Last week, we discussed that there were problems involving importing the revolving restaurant portion of the CN Tower to Visual Analysis. There was also another problem that occurred when going onto result view. We realized that importing an assembly would cause the tower to fall apart because an assembly is just a bunch of parts connected together. We tried to fix this by changing deleting nodes and changing around members, however that proved to be tedious and inefficient. Examples of what we tried to do can be seen in figure 1 and 2.

figure 1: The circled nodes were deleted and replace with just one node.

Figure 2: The nodes were replace and a new member was made to represent connectivity between parts

We decided to create a new 3D CAD model, specifically made to import to Visual Analysis. This time the whole CN Tower would be made into one part, meaning no assembly. This way there would be no parts falling when the model is imported into Visual Analysis. The new part consisted of a new, more simplified version of the revolving restaurant, as shown in figure 3. 

Figure 3: New revolving resturant. 

It was successfully imported to Visual Analysis with surprising no problems at all! The new revolving restaurant did not affect the stiffness matrix of the tower, and no parts fell apart, as the whole CAD model was just one part. Figure 4 shows that the tower functions properly in Visual Analysis, and all the parts of the CN Tower moving as one. 

Figure 4: Result view of new imported CN Tower CAD model

Load analysis will be under way! We predict to finish sometimes this week.