Getting Started with Simulation in Fusion 360: The Basics

ELIZABETH BISHOP: Hello. Thanks for joining my class today, Getting Started with Simulation in Fusion 360, The Basics. I'll start with a little bit about me. My name is Liz or Elizabeth Bishop, and I did my undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Warwick in the UK. And you might recognize me from the UAV project that we did that was on display in AU London and AU Vegas a couple of years ago. And I am now doing a PhD in Large-Scale Additive Manufacturing hoping to finish that up very soon.

I'm also a maker in residence at the University of Warwick's Build Space, so our Maker's Bay, which is a student teaching space where we've got various different 3D printers, CNC machines, and I get involved in a lot of making. You can find my social media down there at the bottom, and you can also follow the Engineering Build Space on there.

But that's not what today is about. Today is about you and learning how to use the simulation workspace in Fusion. So we're going to go through why you might want to use simulation and how it can help you in your design workflow. And then we'll head into Fusion and set up a static stress simulation. We'll go through all the different options, what they mean, and why you might want to use them. And then finally, we'll have a look at our results and how we can use those to influence our design.

So why do we want to use simulation? Simulation is really useful as a design tool. A lot of people just use it to kind of prove their point at the end, and it's kind of like, well, what was really the point of doing that? You really should be using it inside your design process.

So you might have an idea about something that you want to make. And then we go into Fusion. We design that idea. And then we build it. So we manufacture it. And then it doesn't work. And you might have done some quick calculations for that, but it's not always easy to do the calculations on a really complex model.

This is where simulation comes in. So we have that idea. We design it in Fusion, and then we simulate it. And we get those results as if it was in real life, as if we'd already made it. And we can use those results to influence our design. And we can go back. We can make changes to our design. We can resimulate that. We might need to go through that process various different times in a cycle. And then we can manufacture our part. We can build it, print it, machine it, whatever it is you're making. And then, hopefully, we'll have a successful part.

Inside the Simulation Workspace in Fusion, there are loads of different options. Today, we're just going to be looking at static stress, the most basic form of a simulation. If you want to use various different ones, there is loads of help online, and you can also click the Help Me Choose a Study Type if you're not too sure what you want to do.

If you've got any questions about anything that we've gone through today, please do post them in the class page in the discussion. I'll be answering questions on that throughout the whole of AU, and you can reach out to me on my social media. And there'll also be a live Q&A for this session. So please come along to that if you've got any questions or just want to find out a little bit more about the Simulation Workspace.

So let's take a look at static stress in Fusion 360. We're going to have a look at two examples today. So the first one we're going to have a look at is a spanner or wrench, and the second one is a 3D-printed spice shelf bracket that I made. So let's head into Fusion and have a look at the spanner first.

So we're inside Fusion 360 here, and I've opened up a file that I have prepared for this class. So this is Spanner No Fillet, and you can find this on my class page. If you've ever used Fusion 360, you can upload your files using the Upload button here. And then to open a file, double click on it in the data panel. And then you can just close the data panel using this tool here.

When you first open a file, you always are in the design workspace. And for this session, we're going to move from our design workspace into the simulation workspace. And this is where we're going to perform any simulation you might want to do on your part. So click on Design and go to Simulation there. And you can see that the things along the top change a little bit.

When you first go from design to simulation, you get this new study box pop up here. And I showed this in the presentation just before. So we are going to choose a static stress simulation for this one. So we just want a very basic simulation. And each one of these has, if you click on it, it'll show you a little bit about what it is about. And you can also use that Help Me Choose a Study Type if you're not sure what it is you want to do.

So if you click on Static Stress and then Create Study, that takes us into the study space for this part. And with the simulation in Fusion, it's really good. It usually guides you through what you want to do. So we're going to work from left to right across the top bar. We're not going to use the simplified workspace. I'll show you what that does in a moment. So we'll start with our materials.

So this is where you want to set the material that you're using for the simulation. So you might want to simulate various different materials if you're not sure what material you're going to use. In this case, this spanner, this wrench that we're going to simulate, we're going to just leave it as same as model, which is steel.

If you did want to change that, we just use the dropdown, and then you can click on whatever material you want to use. Fusion has got loads of built-in materials so you can use those. And also, you can create your own materials if the one that you want to use doesn't exist. So click OK on that.

The next thing we want to do is apply the constraints. In this case, we're going to use a fixed constraint. So think about the operation of a spanner. These two faces here would be fixed around a nut as you push on the spanner. So we're going to use a fixed constraint, but there are different options that you can choose from, depending on what you're going to be simulating.

And these axes down here, at the moment, all of them are fully fixed, but say you wanted it to move in one particular direction. You could remove that constraint, and then it would allow the movement in that axis. But as I said, in this case, we want it to be fully constrained. So we click OK with that.

The next one along is the load. So we're going to apply a structural load. And we're going to apply it to this face here. I created a split face on the spanner here so that it's just applied to the end half as if you're pushing this spanner around to tighten a nut. And again, we're just going to use the force for this one, but there are different options that you can use depending on what you're trying to simulate and work out.

So we're going to apply a force to the one face, and we're going to apply an angle force in this case rather than a direction one. And we're going to leave them all at zero, and we're going to apply a force with a magnitude of 500 Newtons. And if you're working in America, say, you want to change the units, you can click on this Change Units here, and it gives you the option of the different units that you can use. I tend to work in Newtons all the time so I don't generally change that all that often. But if you need to, you can do.

If you did want to change the angle at which you are applying that force, you can use these pull sections here to do that, or you can change them in the numbers here. So say you were applying that force slightly angled. You can do that. Or you wanted to see what would happen if someone pushed the spanner downwards instead of directly perpendicular to the nut. But we'll leave those at 0 for now, and then click OK.

Next up, along the top is Contacts. So we don't actually need to use contacts for this particular study because we just got one single object. But if you were doing a simulation of an assembly, you might need to apply automatic contacts between the faces of two different objects so that we know that they can move into each other.

The Display is just how the part is appearing. So you can use this to view the mesh. So the mesh in a study is the number of points at which it's going to do the calculations for that study. In this case, we're not going to generate a mesh before we study it, but it will be created when you do the study.

In the Manage tab, these are just the settings that you've got for the study and various different things you can choose. And again, you can do different options for the mesh. There's advanced studies once you start getting into very complex models, and you can also use adaptive mesh refinement if you want to do some very complex things. We're just going to use the defaults for this study here. And you can also change local mesh control. So you can apply a smaller mesh in an area, and you can edit the load case attributes.

Next up, we've got this really handy Pre-Check bit here. So this tells us have we remembered to do everything to set up our study. So have you remembered to put a constraint in? Have you remembered to put a load in? So everything is ready there, and we can hit the Solve button.

I'm going to solve everything on the cloud here, and the really great thing about Fusion is that it does have this on-cloud study. So you can set up your study, press Solve, go away. You can even turn your computer off, and it sits in the background in the cloud solving that study for you.

That's really good because it means you don't need to use your computing power to do that. And also, you can solve multiple simulations at the same time without waiting for the results to come back. So I'm going to hit Solve study, and it will just take a few minutes to come back with the result.

When you press Solve, it jumps first to this job status bar, and you can see how that is progressing. So we can see that it's being sent to the cloud so that's complete. And it's now scheduled and has been started to solve. If you close that and want to check on the status of your study, you can click on the Solve Study bar at the top, and that reopens that bar there. And we can see as this is a really basic simulation, we've got our study back already. So we can click Close, and we can review our results.

So the default view option of our results is, first of all, the safety factor. So engineers use a safety factor to check that apart is sufficiently good enough for the job that you're looking at. So you usually want to have a safety factor of two, but things like aerospace specify you need a higher safety factor for different things.

We can change what we're looking at by using the dropdown here. So we can view the stress, the displacement, the reaction force, and the strain. So let's have a look at the displacement. So this is how much the part moves as a result of that force that we've applied to it. And we can see we've got the minimum zero where it's fully constrained so that's what we'd be expecting, and we can see we've got a maximum of 0.43 millimeters.

Now, having a look at that there, that displacement that it's showing us there looks a lot more than 0.43 millimeters, and that's because our deformation scale is an adjusted scale so that you can see what's going on. We can change that to an undeformed scale, and you can see that you can barely see that deformation there. So just to be aware that that is something that happens, and it shows that with different scales. So let's go back to an adjusted scale, and we can see different ones there. So the one times adjusted at the top there is quite a good one to have a look at.

Going back to our bar along the top for our results, let's have a look at what else we can do with our results. So on this first one, we can animate our results. So I like to do a two-way animation. And we can press Play, and you can see the displacement over time. Let's take a look at the stress for that one.

So if we animate that two-way and click Play, and you can see how the stress in the part changes as that force is applied and taken away. And we can see that the maximum is up here around there. I think it might be somewhere in the middle of the part. So let's see if we can find out where that is.

So we can use these inspection tools. So we've got the Hide Min and Max. So those are those points that are showing there. I tend to have those on to see where our minimum and maximum stresses are. And we can create a surface probe. So surface probe can be run over the surface at any point on that surface to find out what the stress is. And we can see that it's really quite high around this area here but still not that maximum point there.

So what we need to do is to create a slice plane to have a look inside the part. You can click on any flat surface and drag that inside so we can try and find out where that maximum stress is inside the part. I think that might be on the other side actually that point, but let's take a look at the inside of the part. And this time we want to use a point probe.

So point probe can be run over, but it will also run over the inside of the part as well. So we can take a look at those points there, and it will tell us the XYZ coordinates of exactly what that stress is at that point. So that's a really useful tool if you're looking to do that. And we can leave that on or delete those. And if you ever want to just delete all of it, we can just go Delete All Probes, or you can hide them if you want them for later.

Another useful tool that we've got up here is creating a report. So you can click Create Report, and these are the different options that you can have in that report. And it will create you a report that you can share with your teammates, and you can view that online. So if we click Preview, and that study report opens online, and you can see what you set up, the settings you used for it, your mesh settings, the materials you chose, and the load cases you put on.

And then it gives you a full breakdown of all the results from that, the different stresses and safety factors and all of that. And then we also get those views that we've got of all the different results with that split plane that we had on. If you want to remove that split plane and have the results full, you can just click on the plane and click Delete, and then we get a full view with those results.

So you might want to take the results of this and maybe add some fillets and try and reduce the stress around those areas where it's really high. So you could just go back into the design workspace. You could maybe add some fillets using the fillet tool. So you might want to fillet the top and bottom and maybe a one millimeter fillet. And again, you might maybe want to add some fillets around here. And then you could go back into the simulation workspace and resimulate that part.

So next example we're going to have a look at is a spice shelf bracket. So before we do that, I'm going to do a few quick calculations to work out what load we need to add to that bracket so that we can simulate it. So this is a spice shelf that I made. I like to do quite a lot of baking as you can see. I got quite a lot of spices there. If you want to check out any of my baking, you can find me on Instagram @bishskitchen on there.

Anyway, back to the calculations. So in order to work out the load that I needed to apply, I weighed one full spice jar, which was 150 grams. And then I counted up all the spice jars that I had, which was 35. Yes, I know that's quite a lot. So anyway, 150 by 35 gives us 5,250 grams. Putting that to kilos gives us 5.25 kilos, and I thought just to be safe in case I buy any more spices, I should round that up to 6 kilos.

So to find the force that we want to apply for that bracket, we take our 6 kilos times it by gravity, which is approximately 10, which gives us 60 Newtons. Now, this is a very sort of napkin calculation, a bit quick. In an engineering scenario, you might want to take a little bit more time and work out various different loads. But it's a very quick calculation. It'll give us a rough idea of have we got it right or not. So let's head into Fusion and see how that turns out.

So back into Fusion and we're going to have a look at that spice shelf bracket that I made. So let's go from the design workspace into the simulation workspace. I'm going to choose our study type as static stress, same as before. And you can see here that I actually have modeled the wall and the bracket. So this is because I wanted to show you the simplified workspace here.

So the first choice after Study is Simplify. We can click on that. And what we can do in here is you can simplify your model. So if you've got a complex assembly, it's got lots of nuts and bolts, which aren't going to affect your simulation that much, you can remove them, and it means your simulation will resolve a lot faster.

So what we can do is click on the shelf and click Remove and the same with the wall and remove. And that means in our simulation workspace, we're just working with the bracket. But if we went back to our design, it would still have all those other components. So it's a really useful tool if you want to simplify anything, make your simulation quicker to solve and a little bit more simple to work with. So when we're done with that, we can click Finish Simplify.

Same as before, we're going to work from left to right across the top. So we start with our materials. Now, I 3D printed these in PLA, but we're going to use ABS as that's a built-in plastic in Fusion and click OK. We want to apply our constraints. So I'm going to use that fixed constraint again, and I'm going to fix the back piece against the wall as if it's fixed solidly to the wall. It's not a completely 100% accurate representation of what goes on, but it will give us a good idea about what's going to happen with our bracket.

And then we want to apply our load. So we click on Load, and this time, it's going to be on that top face there, and I'm going to use that normal load there instead of the angle one like we used on the spanner. And that magnitude that we just calculated is the 60 Newtons. I'm going to leave that as Newtons and click OK.

We don't need any contacts as it's a single part again, and we can click on the Pre-Check to make sure we've got everything set up, ready to go, which we have so we can click OK. And then we can solve that on the cloud. So I'm doing a cloud simulation. It's going to cost five credits, and I'm going to click Solve One Study. I'm going to leave that solving there.

And we've got our results, and we can see that we've got that safety factor similar to what we had on the spanner. Let's take a look at the displacement. Now, this is showing a 1.582 millimeter displacement. I think that's going to be quite a lot for my spice shelf. Let's have a look at what that actually looks like. Yeah you can really see that visible deformation. I think all the spice jars might fall off the shelf if I leave it like that.

So let's take a look at a little bit of a different design. So I muddled up a second version, which has a cross bracing inside the inside of the part. So we've got that here with this cross bracing. Let's set up exactly the same simulation and see how that comes out. So from the design workspace to the simulation workspace, and choose a static stress. And we want to use the same simplify as we did before. So in the simplify workspace, I'm just going to remove the shelf and the wall, which leaves us just with the bracket.

Static stress, set the materials. Constraints is going to be fixed on that face, and the load is the 60 Newtons across the top. We've got everything ready, and we can solve that on the cloud. We've got our results. Let's compare the displacement with those two parts there. Yes, we can see that the displacement is over a millimeter less. Let's look at that with the actual deformation. There's still a little bit of displacement, but I think that will probably be OK for the part.

So we've got our two results there. We can see that we've got the 1.58 on the one without the cross brace and the 0.5887 there. And this was the design that I actually went with, the one with the cross brace here. So I printed three of these on my 3D printer with PLA and set that up with a shelf in my kitchen. And so far, I've had no accidents with spice jars. So fingers crossed, it'll hold out for much longer.

So hopefully, you found today interesting. Just to go over what we've done, so we have learned how you can use simulation in your design workflow and why you might want to. So you don't want those parts to fail, and you can use that simulation as a tool before you build your part to check that it's going to work.

We've learnt how to set up a static stress simulation using the spanner and the shelf bracket as an example and what options to use and why you might want to choose them. And as I showed with the shelf bracket, you can see how you might use those results of the simulation to influence your design. So we added that cross brace to reduce the deformation of that spice shelf bracket.

So hopefully, you found that interesting and that you have learned a little bit about the static stress area in the simulation workspace and know how to use that now. If you want any more, then please reach out on my speaker page. You can leave a comment, ask a question on that class page. And if you liked it, please give it a thumbs up, recommend it, and you can also reach out on my social media. So thank you very much for joining me today, and I hope you enjoy the rest of AU.