Simulating yielded state on an E-clip

[Wunderbear]

Hello,

I performing a stress analysis using solidworks simulation on a standard E clip and was wondering how I should interpret the results. Specifically, I'm trying to simulate what happens during insertion- when I apply a displacement boundary condition on the lead-in, I see multiple areas where the stress goes above the yield stress of the material but these could be characterized more as stress concentrations i.e. the stresses in the bulk of the material are still well under the yield stress.

So the question is - is there any way to simulate what happens to the part after yielding? I'm guessing in this case, that as the bulk of the material has not yielded, the clip will return to almost its original state and the effect of yielding will be minimal. Is this something that is commonly done or is the goal of any stress analysis always to keep all the max stress under the yield stress?

 

[NRP99]

Wunderbear

It seems the stresses are stress concentrations around the inside rounded corners. If the amount of stress concentration is not large enough and limited to 1 layer of element in depth and 2 to 3 elements wide, you can straight away ignore it. But if the loading is in cycles, which I Guess is(Insertion and retraction of E clamp), you may need to find out fatigue life for given loading cycles. You cannot ignore peak stress or stress concentrations for the cyclic loading.

In real life the stresses at corner will yield the corner and redistribute themselves. The yield area will be very small and it can be safely assumed that the overall behavior of the component is elastic.

If you want to check how much area of the component yields, run elastic-perfect plastic analysis.

 

[Tmoose]

Please post your mesh.

What material properties are you using ?