The best of two software worlds for the verification of bolted connections

Bringing together two software worlds, ANSYS’s FEM and KISSsoft has enabled the evaluation of connecting bolts all along their entire service life. After the calculation with ANSYS, extensive results are available both in graphical and tabular form, which can be exported to KISSsoft for further detailed verification calculation.

Bolts are among the most commonly used connecting elements and are therefore often used in large numbers to connect components with each other. The challenge is to evaluate many bolts as efficiently as possible, conveniently for the software user and reliably over the entire service life. For this reason, the ANSYS^® application Fast+More was developed by engineers from practice for engineers, bringing together the best of two worlds: the FEM software of the market leader ANSYS and the detailed verification in KISSsoft^®.

Representation and evaluation of hundreds of bolted connections

Fast+More is an ANSYS extension that is easily and quickly installed via the ACT console. It is fully integrated into the ANSYS interface and can therefore be easily learned. Large models are one of Fast+More’s strengths: they often consist of shell elements (but also volume elements) and contain many hundreds of bolted connections that have to be represented and evaluated by beam models. Bores of many different types are automatically recognized and the connecting elements are generated. After the calculation with ANSYS, extensive results are available both in graphical and tabular form, which can be exported to KISSsoft for further detailed verification calculation. All generated objects are always ANSYS Mechanical^® standard objects to which the user always has full access.