ANSYS problem

Situation: I have a grid of little pines that can only move vertically. Those pines are controlled to create a desired shape or can be moved by users hand to display a desired shape. In order to improve the appearance of the surface, I put a hyper elastic covering membrane. My purpose is to determine the influence of the membrane over the underneath pines. The idea is to create an analytical model considering that pines are linked by non linear springs. Thus, if we can determine the non linear spring characteristic curve or a polynomial fitting curve, and knowing the elongations of the non linear springs between each pines thanks to their positions, we could get the force applied on each pine due to our analytical membrane. To determine the non linear spring characteristic curve, I use a finite element code, ANSYS, to run non linear analysis and get the reaction forces to a certain load. With ANSYS results, I can compute the forces in each non linear spring that links 2 neighboring pines. My problem with ANSYS is that, with a hyper elastic material, the membrane should be able to be largely stretched. And with my set, I can only stretched it out of its initial flat plane by 30%. ANSYS settings: I am currently using ANSYS 6.0 on a Windows 2000 platform. The piece of membrane that I consider for the moment is a hexagon with edges of 3 mm. There is a pine at each submit of the hexagon and an additional one in the center of the hexagon. Membrane is supposed to be attached to the pines. Thus I just create a model of the membrane and defined zones where the pines are supposed to be attached. For the central pine, its zone of attachment is a disc and for the other, it is the piece of disc that it included in the hexagon, the discs are centered at each submit. Discs have a diameter of 1.5 mm. As my membrane is hyper elastic, I use the non linear mechanics of material model: Mooney-Rivlin. As I could not find some known values for the constants of that model, I just used the fact that they are related to the Young Modulus E as follows: 6*(C1+C2) = E and I fix the quotient C1/C2.

Material parameters: Young Modulus: E = 107 Mpa Poissons ratio: = 0.49 Mooney-Rivlin constants quotient: C2/C1 = varying Meshing: Element: Shell181 with a thickness of 1 mm. This shell element allows large strain. I have not yet used a 3-D hyper elastic element as Hyper58 or Hyper86. I use triangular element because the circular zones of attachment are better meshed like this. Otherwise, quadratic elements are too stretched at some places, even in the initial configuration, and I have an error message. I tried different meshing sizes: 1/5, 1/10, 1/20 of the reference length 3 mm. Solving settings: Due to the non linearity of the analysis, I define the following parameters. Number of substeps: 40, max = 100, min = 26 (nsubst,40,100,25) Number of iterations at each substep: 20 (nquit,20) Large deformation allowed (nlgeom,on) Optimized nonlinear solution (!solcontrol,on) Convergence criterion (cnvtol,f,,,,0.001) Load configuration: For the moment, I fix all the attachment areas around the hexagon to zero, UX, UY and UZ are fixed to zero. And I rise the central attachment area. I tried different values, and the maximum value I can reach is 1 mm before divergence of the non linear analysis. Analysis: I ran several analysis to find the influence of my different parameters. For the Mooney-Rivlin constants quotient, I tried some values from 0 to 1. With a meshing of 1/10, the solving settings in brackets and a vertical displacement of 1 mm for the central attachment area, it converges for a quotient less or equal to 1/3. The changes in meshing size are not very significant for the same settings. I get almost the same results. When I increase the meshing to 1/20, I can reach a vertical displacement of 1.1mm. I cannot reach a higher vertical displacement when I increase the number of substeps.

I can get almost the same results when I use a different convergence criterion: displacement instead of force. If I want to use moment criterion, I have to increase the minimum reference number from 0.001 to 0.005. If I change the optimized nonlinear solution (solcontrol), it still converges and I get almost the same results. I have to use large deformation with the Mooney-Rivlin model. Questions: First, I do not know how to find the values of the Mooney-Rivlin constants for hyper elastic materials as natural rubber. I tried to search in several material references but they never give values and always refer to experimental tests that are the only way to get them. Would you know where I could find those Mooney-Rivlin constants values? Or if it not directly, is there a book that gathers experimental results of different mechanical tests run on elastomer material as natural rubber? Second and most important, why I cannot reach higher vertical displacement of the central attachment area? Why it diverges above 1 mm? Can I get higher displacement? Appendix: my text program /filname,test,1 /prep7 /title,hyper elastic membrane S=0.003 ES1=S/10 ES2=S/10 E=1E7 RAB=1/3 A=E/(6*(1+RAB)) B=RAB*A cS=(sqrt(3)/2)*S sS=0.5*S M=(sqrt(3)/2)*S*0.5 N=(sqrt(3)/2)*S*(sqrt(3)/2) et,1,shell181 r,1,0.001 k,1,,-S ! hexagonal edge length ! meshing size for the attachment areas ! meshing size for the rest of the model ! Young Modulus ! Mooney-Rivlin constants quotient ! first M-R constant ! second M-R constant

! element ! element thickness

k,2,cS,-sS k,3,cS,sS k,4,,S k,5,-cS,sS k,6,-cS,-sS k,7,, l,1,2 l,2,3 l,3,4 l,4,5 l,5,6 l,6,1 a,1,2,3,4,5,6 R=S/4 circle,1,R,,2,120 circle,2,R,,3,120 circle,3,R,,4,120 circle,4,R,,5,120 circle,5,R,,6,120 circle,6,R,,1,120 circle,7,R l,1,8 l,13,2 l,2,11 l,16,3 l,3,14 l,19,4 l,4,17 l,22,5 l,5,20 l,25,6 l,6,23 l,10,1 al,23,7,8,34 al,24,25,9,10 al,26,27,11,12 al,28,29,13,14 al,30,31,15,16 al,32,33,17,18

al,19,20,21,22 asba,1,2,,keep,keep asba,9,3,,delete,keep asba,10,4,,delete,keep asba,9,5,,delete,keep asba,10,6,,delete,keep asba,9,7,,delete,keep asba,10,8,,delete,keep mshape,1 esize,ES1 amesh,2,8 esize,ES2 amesh,9 mp,nuxy,1,0.49 tb,mooney,1 tbdata,1,A,B nsubst,40,100,25 nlgeom,on da,2,uz,0 da,3,uz,0 da,4,uz,0 da,5,uz,0 da,6,uz,0 da,7,uz,0 da,2,ux,0 da,3,ux,0 da,4,ux,0 da,5,ux,0 da,6,ux,0 da,7,ux,0 da,8,ux,0 da,2,uy,0 da,3,uy,0 da,4,uy,0 da,5,uy,0 da,6,uy,0 da,7,uy,0 da,8,uy,0 ! attachment areas fixed to zero ! triangular meshing ! meshing of the attachment areas ! meshing of the rest of the model ! Poissons ratio

da,8,uz,0.001 neqit,20 nsel,all !nsel,s,node,,91,117 finish /solution nsel,all outres,all,all !solcontrol,on cnvtol,f,,,,0.001 solve /out finish

! vertical displacement of the central attachment area

! convergence criterion