Al-Akhawayn University

Mechanics of Materials
Section 2

The Effect of Geometry on the Stress

and Strain Distributions

Lab report 03

Student Names:
Instructor:
Idriss SEFRIOUI
Zineb salma Bahri
Yassine JAMALI

Group Number 10
Group submission

22 February 2023
Contents

1 Introduction 2

2 Experimental Methods 2

3 Results and Discussion 2

4 Conclusion 5

1
1 Introduction

In this lab we studied to effect of geometry on the stress strain

distribution using ANSYS. To that effect we simulated a tensile force
for three different shapes: cuboid, cylinder, and dog-bone shape.

2 Experimental Methods

To analyze how stress and strain are effected by the geometry of

the specimen we used ANSYS. We started by creating the appro-
priate geometry of our specimen, beginning with the cuboid shape,
next we set one face of the shape as a fix support and applied an
elongation of 1mm per second to the other face. Finally, we gen-
erated a mesh of 1mm element size and solved the simulation to
generate the Von Mises stress strain distribution for the given ge-
ometry. This process was repeated for the cylinder and dog-bone
shapes.

3 Results and Discussion

Figure 1: Strain Simulation for a Cuboid Specimen

2
 Figure 2: Stress Simulation for a Cuboid Specimen

Figure 3: Strain Simulation for a Cylindrical Specimen

3
 Figure 4: Stress Simulation for a Cylindrical Specimen

Figure 5: Strain Simulation for a Dog-Bone Shaped Specimen

Figure 6: Stress Simulation for a Dog-Bone Shaped Specimen

In most cases of physics and engineering the problems are expressed

in partial differential equations. Usually these PDEs can’t be solved
numerically as such approximations of the PDEs are generated based

4
on discretization. The discretization methods approximate the PDEs
with numerical models which can be solved numerically. These ap-
proximations can be calculated using the finite element method.
Part of the process of simulating our results was to create a mesh.
The purpose of that step is to increase the accuracy of our results
and reduce the amount of resources needed to run our simulation.
A mesh is a network of cells, and is used to generate a 2D or 3D grid
over the geometry to discretize it and analyze it. For our simulations
we chose specimen made of structural steel and as can be seen from
figures 1 to 6 the least and most stress and strain experienced is
the case of the cuboid and dog-bone shape respectively. We also see
that in the case of the cylinder and cuboid that both the stress and
strain we uniformly distributed throughout the shape while in the
case of the dog-bone shape there was a concentration of the stress
and strain in the middle of the specimen

4 Conclusion

In this lab we studied how geometry affects the stress strain dis-
tribution as such we can conclude that depending on the application
some geometries may be preferred over others. For example in the
case of a tensile test it will be more interesting to work with dog-
bone shaped specimen than a cylindrical specimen since the former
will experience more stress and strain at its mid-point which will
allow for easier analysis and more accuracy.