Readme

EFFECT OF FRICTION --- SIMULATION OF A LOG

PILE
Overview
This document aims at demonstrating the effect of friction. The movement of a wood
log pile under gravity load is modeled. A simulation with frictionless contact between
logs is conducted, then repeated by changing the contact to frictional. Adding
friction high enough help the pile hold itself together. The simulations use explicit
dynamics analysis and assume the logs as rigid bodies because their strains are not
the interest of this simulation.

Goals
• To understand the effect of friction

Steps
Modeling a wood log pile without friction
1. Open Ansys workbench, create an "Explicit Dynamics" analysis. Check the
units.
2. Add wood material. There is a sample wood material available in Ansys
engineering data.
3. Import the geometry (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The geometry of the bolt thread model

4. Mesh the model and define contact. Before meshing the model, change the
stiffness behavior of all the parts to rigid. Use Multi-zone mesh method to the
logs. Assign a face mesh sizing of 200mm to the lateral faces, and 80mm to
the end faces. One may need to turn the mesh sizing behavior to “hard” to force
the mesh to confirm the sizing. Delete all the contacts and use body
interaction in explicit dynamics. Set the interaction type as “frictionless” for all
the parts.
2|Page

5. Define analysis setting and assign boundary conditions. Define two steps. A
gravity force is applied to all the parts and is active in both steps. In the first
step, the two outmost logs at the bottom layer are fixed using remote
displacements (Figure 2). The purpose of the first step is to allow the logs to
adjust their initial position and fully contact each other. In the second step,
these constraints are released to allow the logs to move freely. Each step has
1s of simulation time, and the maximum time step is set as 1e-4s.

Figure 2. An illustration of the boundary conditions

6. Run the simulation and review the results. Request a deformation output. As
expected, without friction, these logs collapse soon after the constraint is
released.

Figure 3. A contour plot of the log pile without friction

Modeling a wood log pile with friction

7. Run an analysis with friction. Duplicate the analysis system in Workbench.
Rename it as "Explicit dynamics with friction". Edit the model in Mechanical.
3|Page

Change the body interaction type to “frictional” and assign a coefficient of

friction of 0.7. The maximum energy error may need to be turned off (changed
to 0) in the analysis setting. Rerun the simulation. The deformation contour
plot at 2s is shown in Figure 4. From the deformation history plot in Figure 5,
one can also see that the maximum deformation stays the same after the
constraint is released, which means the pile can hold itself together by friction.

Figure 4. A contour plot of the log pile with friction

Figure 5. Maximum deformation vs. time

Summary
The document demonstrates the effect of friction by simulating a common scenario
in daily life. Explicit dynamics analysis can capture complex interaction between
objectives and the fast movement of objects and is thus suitable for this type of
simulation. This simulation also emphasizes the importance of choosing a reasonable
contact behavior and coefficient of friction in a simulation.