\nAs you can see we have the load applied to the end of the plate and have fixed one end of the torsion bar. After running the analysis and looking at the default displacement plot we can see the resultant displacements.
\n
\nThis however does not do us much good if we are looking for angular displacements.\u00a0 You may or may not know that under the \u201cAdvanced Options\u201d while creating a new plot, you can define a reference plane, axis, or coordinate system.\u00a0 Anytime you select an axis as your reference SolidWorks automatically switches to polar coordinates. For the case of displacements we want to define a UY Displacement plot and use the axis that we want the displacements about as the reference; this will give you a plot of tangential displacements (UX and UZ give radial and axial displacements respectively).<\/p>\n
If you want to know the angular displacements at multiple locations you can probe multiple spots or probe using \u201con selected entities\u201d to get the tangential displacements at every node along an edge, for example. The values then can be exported out into a CSV file and used in excel to do the above calculation for all points.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Chris Olson is a Technical Services Engineer at\u00a0Graphics Systems<\/a>, a SolidWorks Value Added Reseller with locations across Wisconsin and Illinois. He is a regular contributor to the Graphics Systems\u2019 blog:\u00a0SolidNotes.com<\/a>, your source for SolidWorks, Simulation, Data Management, & Product Communication Tips & Tricks.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A common question we often get regarding post processing of a SolidWorks Simulation study is: Does SolidWorks Simulation have a way of displaying displacement plots as angles of displacement in the case of a torsional load?\u00a0 SolidWorks currently does not<\/p>\n... Continued<\/a>","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":19426,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,63,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-solidworks","category-solidworks-simulation","category-tips-tricks"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/136"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19420\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>
\nNow that we have tangential displacements about our axis of torque we can apply the arc length equation to solve for the angle of displacements.\u00a0 The best way to find out the displacement at a particular point is to \u201cProbe\u201d a particular place on the plot. This can be done by right clicking the plot from the Simulation tree and going to \u201cProbe\u201d.\u00a0 You can then select any point(s) on the plot that you want to know the angle of displacement of.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nI have selected the point where the load is applied as my probe location. The probe command displays the tangential displacement at this point as well as the coordinates of the point. We know the coordinates of the axis, so we can apply the distance formula to determine the resulting distance between the axis and the point. Using this value we can divide the tangential displacement value by the distance we just calculated to get the angle of displacement.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nHopefully this can be of some benefit to those of you who have pondered this very question. If you are interested in seeing further how excel can be utilized for these calculations, you can download the sample files that I\u2019ve used\u00a0here<\/a>. These files include an excel document that shows how formulas can be leveraged to calculate angular displacements for the edge shown above.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n