Defining the constraint

- [Instructor] We're now going to apply a fixed geometry constraint at the big end of the con rod. Click on the study tab, conrod static analysis, hover over the Fixtures icon in the model feature tree, right mouse click. We can see there's a menu of different types of constraints we can apply to an FEA model. Click on Fixed Geometry, the icon with the little anchor. The little animation here clearly shows the behavior of this type of constraint. There are three selection boxes, Fixed Geometry, Roller Slider, and Fixed Hinge.

These allow us to refine our constraints a little further, but we're going to stay with the Fixed Geometry option selected here. Now, there's a tab labeled Split. Let's click on this. You can see it's actually a shortcut to the insert curve split geometry command that we used previously. If you find yourself needing to manipulate geometry when you come to set up constraints, this is very handy. However, I prefer to plan ahead with the geometry manipulation so that I can take all of the constraints, loads, and meshing requirements into consideration into a single strategy.

Click on the Type tab to return to the main form. All that's left to do now is to select the two inside surfaces of the big end. Click OK. The symbols for the constraint are now visible on the surfaces at the big end. And this constraint also appears now in the model feature tree. Click into the name next to the icon and update the name to big end fixed.

Right mouse click on the icon. We can see various menu actions listed. Hide removes the constraint symbols from the model display. Then we can show back again. Suppress and Unsuppress toggle removing and adding the constraint in the current study, but it doesn't delete it from the database. This can be very useful when we're working with a set of constraints, which we may be varying between analysis. Edit Definition allows us to manipulate this constraint.

We can delete or we can copy. This is useful for copying constraints across load cases. Now we save the database. We save it as baseline_6. So we've applied a fixed geometry constraint to the big end and reviewed some of the actions we can take with a constraint entity.