trying to do some simple FEA

[mackconsult]

I have a simple weldment here for the bow of a sailboat I am captaining from Vancouver, Canada to Cabo San Lucas. This is so we can properly fly a code zero and gennaker sail.

It will be bolted to the bow roller of this aluminum boat.

I have solidworks 2014 proffesional, and would like to do a simple FEA analysis on this weldment to see the deflection and stresses.

I modeled fillets where the tangents of the rods meet flat side of plates, but still getting a "Unable to create this feature because it would result in zero-thickness geometry" when trying to combine the bodies.

Any help greatly appreciated.

 

[Bouta]

This will be pretty hard for a cad software if you ask me.
1. Try adding some limits to the fillets if there even is such option in solidworks.2
2. Try creating a small (even 0.5mm should do the trick) intersection of the rod and the beam. At the moment it looks like this:



You have linear contact between the parts. I'm no math freak but mathematically it's very hard to even calculate for the software where the fillet is supposed to be. Try something like this - it will create an actual edge that you can put the fillet on:

 

[mackconsult]

that is what I did, re-modeled it and basically made sure that everything interseted with no tangents. Also starting as a weldment helped I think. Passed with flying colors.