Introduction

To access the Cable tab from the Adams View:

The Adams Machinery Cable module provides for the modeling of cable systems within the Adams View environment.

Two modeling methods are available:

The cable's mass and inertia are neglected. Dummy parts with pure kinematic constraints are used to track the tangent lines between pulleys. Angles between dummy parts of same pulley determine cable length that's around each pulley. Differential equations are used to track cable span physical length from integrating the pulleys' angular velocities. Cable span tension forces are computed from the difference between the cable span's pure geometry and physical length. Appropriate action-only forces are applied on the pulleys to replicate the effect of cable contact with friction.

The simplified cable provides a very fast solution which generates accurate loads on the pulleys as long as cable mass and inertia effects are negligible with respect to transmission effect. Winching effects are accounted for in terms of the addition and removal of cable length from the system. Pulleys can be offset from base plane and rotated in and out of plane during design time and disengage from the cable during the course of a simulation.

All pulleys must be initially engaged with the cable (as mentioned above they can disengage during the simulation).The pulleys must have a circular shape. The pulleys must not move so much during the simulation that the wrap order (routing) changes. Winching effect of increased pulley diameter is not accounted for.

For two consecutive pulleys, one of the pulley plane shouldn't intersect through the center of other pulley.

The cable is discretized with appropriate parts, joints and forces (mass, inertia, beam-formulation-based longitudinal, bending and torsional stiffnesses). Contact with pulleys is applied with forces using an optimized analytical formulation (sphere/ cylinder) in the plane together with an appropriate lateral guidance approximation.

The discretized cable will compute precise cable vibrations and forces on pulleys in scenarios where the mass and inertia effects of the cable are important. Pulleys can be offset from base plane and rotated in and out of plane during design time and disengage from the cable during the course of a simulation. This method is also useful as a reference for result comparison with equivalent simplified cable analyses.

All pulleys must be initially be engaged with the cable (as mentioned above they can disengage during the simulation). The pulleys must have a circular shape. All winching effects are neglected.

For two consecutive pulleys, one of the pulley planes shouldn't intersect through the center of other pulley.