BOWLING BALL IMPACT SIMULATION

 Overview

 This simulation uses a common bowling ball example to illustrate the idea of contact. Frictionless body interaction is defined between the ball and the pins and within the pins.

 Goals

To learn the concept of contact

 Steps

1. Open Ansys workbench, create an “explicit dynamics” analysis system.

 

2. Define materials. Materials are defined for the pin and the ball.

3. Import the geometry

4. Assign material to parts and mesh the geometry. Assign a hex-dominant meshing method to all the parts and mesh them with a global mesh size of 20mm. Frictionless body interaction is also defined between all bodies.

5. Define analysis settings and boundary conditions. Define the end time as 1s and a minimum time step size of 1e-4s. Assign an initial velocity fo 3000mm/s in the y-direction to the ball.

6. Run the simulation. A contour plot of deformation is shown bellow.

7. Run the simulation without body interactions. A contour plot of deformation is shown bellow.

Summary

This example illustrates the bowling ball impact process and the concept of body interaction. In case without the body interactions between ball and pins, there is no contact between them.