Defining a Minimum Truss Thickness (Minimum Member Size)

Thin trusses in the resulting structure are often undesirable, depending on the manufacturing process. You can define a minimum truss thickness to avoid the creation of small substructures in the final result.

This task shows you how to:

Before you begin:
  • It is impossible to ensure the accurate minimum thickness of the structures. For some cases, the results contain parts with a diameter smaller than the defined minimum member size.
  • The CPU-time for the calculation increases quadratically with the minimum member size. To save calculation time, the restriction should only be defined in the areas of the model where thin parts should be avoided. To identify these areas, the first step is to perform an optimization without restrictions.
See Also
About Member Size Control
In Other Guides
DVCON_TOPO

Define a Minimum Member Size in Tosca Structure.gui

  1. Choose Command > DVCON_TOPO in Tosca Structure.pre.
  2. Define the Minimum Member Size as shown in the following figure:

  3. Or use the DVCON_TOPO command: 

    
DVCON_TOPO
  ID_NAME    = <Name of DVCON object>
  EL_GROUP   = <Element group to be restricted>
  CHECK_TYPE = MIN_MEMBER
  THICKNESS  = <minimum thickness of structures>
END_

    The result of the minimum / maximum member size control looks like follows: