Introduction to Adams Durability
Adams Durability, part of the Adams
® 2024.1 suite of software, extends the traditional test-based durability design process into the virtual world. With Adams Durability, you can simulate a durability duty cycle and write out component load histories in or formats and drive a durability test rig using output data in
RPC III Format or
DAC Format. You can visualize stress or detect hot spots in flexible bodies, and you can improve component design by interfacing with fatigue life prediction programs.
Some of the features of Adams Durability are available as a demand-loaded library (DLL), while the rest are available as a plugin to the various Adams interface or vertical products, such as Adams View, Adams PostProcessor, and Adams Car.
See the section
Adams File Types for more information on Adams Durability file types.
How You Benefit from Using Adams Durability
Adams Durability enables you to work faster and smarter, letting you easily interface with durability test machines using the
RPC III Format, and with fatigue life calculation programs using
DAC Format, or with an FEA program for stress recovery.
You benefit from using Adams Durability in the following ways:
■Shortens your development cycle, reducing costly durability testing.
■Reduces disk space requirements and improves performance by providing direct file input and output in RPC III and DAC formats. For example, when you perform a 25-second Adams simulation with 300 channels of data, sampled at a rate of 409.6 points per second, to capture a durability event, the Adams
Request files are approximately 48 MB, whereas the RPC III file is only 6 MB.
■Provides access to the system-level simulation capabilities of Adams View, or vertical products, such as Adams Car.
■Provides access to dynamic stress recovery methods using NASTRAN or ANSYS.
■Performs modal stress recovery of flexible bodies.
■Provides access to component life prediction using MSC.Fatigue or CAEfatigue.
Using Adams Durability On Demand
The Adams Durability installation includes a library that is compatible with most of the Adams products, including Adams View, Adams PostProcessor, Adams Solver, and the vertical product solvers such as Adams Car Solver. This library provides the DAC and RPC III file capabilities of Adams Durability. It is demand-loaded automatically by the various products when you use a feature of Adams Durability that requires this library; therefore, you do not need to know how to access this library.
With the Adams Durability demand-loaded library, you can simulate a durability duty cycle in Adams and write out component load histories in RPC III and DAC formats. For example, you can simulate a virtual test rig where actuator inputs like spindle loads are taken from field measurements and stored in the RPC III format. Then, you can write out component load histories in DAC format for subsequent component durability testing or fatigue life prediction.
You can perform the following with DAC or RPC III files:
■Browse the files for header information, such as number of time steps, sample rate, number of channels, channel names, channel maximums, and channel minimums.
■Plot the time history data.
■Filter, integrate, or transform the sampled data.
■Drive or excite Adams models with the data.
■Interpolate the channel data by cubic splines.
Loading the Adams Durability Plugin
The Adams Durability plugin gives you access to the various stress recovery techniques in Adams, and interfaces to NASTRAN, ANSYS, CAEfatigue, and MSC.Fatigue. This plugin is available in most of the Adams interface or vertical products, such as Adams View, Adams PostProcessor, Adams Car, and Adams Driveline.
To load the Adams Durability plugin:
1. Start one of the Adams interface or vertical products.
2. From the Tools menu, select Plugin Manager.
3. Select the Load checkbox next to Adams Durability.
4. Select OK.
This creates the Durability menu, adds various stress and strain Plot Type menu options for the Contours tab in Adams PostProcessor, and adds several functions to the Misc. Functions category in the Adams View Function Builder, such as LIFE, MAX_STRESS, HOT_SPOTS, and TOP_SPOTS.
To unload the Adams Durability plugin:
1. From the Tools menu, select Plugin Manager.
2. Clear the Load checkbox next to Adams Durability.
3. Select OK.