Hydrostatic pressure loads for a tank using “CID Distributed Loads” fields in a PATRAN FEM model

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present a practical way to introduce distributed loads on the walls of a tank in order to perform a FEM analysis using PATRAN/NASTRAN programs. The problem is generated mainly by the fact that there are gravitational accelerations in the three directions of the moving airplane that produce a great number of combinations of inertial loads and consequently a great number of critical load cases. We compared the performed stress analysis with the loads obtained with this method in different cases for 𝑛𝑛=1. (Different forms of the fuel tanks and different placements of the tank inside the aircraft). The form and the density of the grid do not significantly affect the precision of the real inertia loads. Using the presented method one can reduce the volume of FEM files used in the analysis and can quite accurately reproduce the pressure loads on the fuel of a moving aircraft.

Keywords

• hydrostatic pressure
• finite element simulations
• distributed loads
• fuel tank for aircrafts
• stress analysis