6.4. Performing the Rigid Body Analysis

Run the crank slot analysis using a rigid body specification. Specifying a body as rigid in Mechanical APDL models it as a combination of:

A MASS21 element at the center of gravity (CG) of the parts, and
MPC184 elements for the joints connected to each other via rigid body nodes.

For more information, see Modeling Rigid Bodies in a Multibody Analysis. The input fileCrankSlot_Rigid.inp is used to perform the rigid body portion of the analysis.

The following figures show the finite element (FE) representation of the model and the time-history plot of the total displacement of the rigid Rod2 part: