Inflatable dams are flexible, cylindrical structures anchored to a foundation. They are used for a variety of purposes, e.g. diverting water for irrigation or groundwater recharging, impounding water for recreational purposes, and raising the height of existing dams or spillways. The vibration behavior of such dams is analyzed. Single-anchor inflatable dams with fins are considered. First, a static analysis is performed which yields the equilibrium shapes of the dam, both in the presence and absence of water. Then, a dynamic analysis is undertaken which analyzes the small vibrations of the inflatable dam about the equilibrium configuration, both in the presence of water (hydrostatic water as well as parallel flowing water) and absence of water. The dam is modeled as an elastic shell. It is assumed to be air-inflated and resting on a rigid foundation. The cross-sectional perimeter, material thickness, modulus of elasticity, and Poisson's ratio are given. The analysis is performed for different values of internal pressure and external water heads. Initially, the dam is assumed to lie flat. The internal pressure is then increased slowly until it reaches the desired value. Then the external water is applied and the equilibrium configuration is obtained. Small vibrations about this configuration are considered. The water is assumed to be inviscid and incompressible, and potential theory is used. The infinite-frequency limit is assumed on the free surface. A boundary element technique is utilized to determine the behavior of the water, and the finite element program ABAQUS is used to analyze the structural behavior. Both the cases of fluid at rest and flowing parallel to the dam are considered. The vibration frequencies and mode shapes are computed. The effect of the internal pressure of the dam is investigated, and the results are compared to those for the dam in the absence of external water. / Master of Science

ABSTRACT Presently, many industrial applications of gear sets with skew axes, especially worm gear and hypoid gear, are most widely used. The main content of this thesis is to construct the contact analysis model of the line-contacted type tooth profile of gear sets with skew axes with assembly error. The influence of geometrical parameters of skew-axes gear to the transmission error is analyzed. The complex method for optimization is implemented to select the better skew-axes gear parameters with the best performance in transmission error with assembly error. To prove the presented analysis model, the optimized gear parameters are utilized to construct the solid model for analyzing the contact properties by using computer simulation program.

The research in this master's thesis examines the mechanics of primate and early hominid feeding within the context of hypotheses about australopithecine diets. Specifically, this work will be helpful in testing the hypothesis that derived craniodental features in australopithecines are adaptations for feeding on hard, brittle, seasonally available foods. These foods may have been “fallback” items that could be fed upon during periods of scarcity, and thus their consumption may have been ecologically important to survival of early humans. In order to test the fallback theory, accurate estimates of bite force to initiate a crack in a hard food source using different tooth shapes is essential. These estimates help test the theory in two ways. First, the estimation of bite force for different tooth profiles helps in explaining effect of tooth morphology on fracture of hard food sources. This will test the premise that some species have more efficient tooth shapes for fracturing hard food than other species. Second, the obtained bite force will be used as an input to full scale finite element skull model of different species. Stress and strain distributions in critical regions of the skull will be helpful in understanding feeding adaptations of the different species during evolution. In this work a fast and accurate finite element analysis method was developed to estimate bite force required to initiate crack in a hard food source like the macadamia nut with different tooth morphologies. The proposed research will help in understanding the effect of tooth shape on the bite force required to initiate a crack in a hard food source In first experiment we simulated nut biting behavior found in ancient hominid by indenting macadamia nuts with aluminum alloy replicas of primate teeth. Finite element analysis simulation of the biting behavior provided insight into stress profile in the nut at the time of fracture. The results were statistically inconclusive due to huge variation in thickness, diameter and material properties of macadamia nut. In order to study effect of teeth shape on bite force, another study was performed in this work where four different hominoid species namely A.afransis, A.africanus, A.boisei and A.robustus of similar age level, were considered. Cast iron replicas of these hominoid teeth were created. In order to eliminate variability in thickness, diameter and material properties, we used acrylic hemispheres as a macadamia nut substitute. Statistical significance testing and FEA revealed that flatter teeth produces significantly lower force required to fracture acrylic hemisphere as compared to pointed and sharp teeth with comparable fracture stress. Results suggest that pointed teeth produces higher stresses in the food resulting in lower force required to fracture but at the same time stresses in teeth is also high increasing the probability of enamel failure. During the evolution teeth might have evolved to obtain optimum shape which provides tread off between minimum force required to fracture hard food items and minimum stress in enamel to reduce probability of enamel fracture Past work in estimating bite force is limited to experimental testing. Physical testing of bite force is tedious and time consuming. The proposed combination of physical testing and supporting finite element analysis will be helpful in reducing lengthy physical testing. The main advantage of this method is the comparatively low computational cost and the ability to estimate full field stresses and strains, as opposed to measuring surface strain at specific points. As our modeling and experimental methods become more refined, we anticipate being able to assess the degree to which tooth morphology affects the force needed to fracture hard food items, thereby providing insights into the dietary adaptations of living and extinct primates, including fossil humans.

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La maîtrise accrue des matériaux et des procédés de forgeage permet aujourd'hui d'obtenir des engrenages coniques d'une qualité suffisante pour pouvoir les utiliser sans autre procédé de finition. Ce sont les pièces dites «net shape». Grâce à cette évolution technologique, il est nécessaire de d'optimiser la définition géométrique de ces engrenages en tenant compte des possibilités des procédés de forgeage, en particulier. Tout d'abord, la définition de la géométrie nominale des engrenages coniques à denture droite basée sur les propriétés géométriques et cinématiques du profil en développante de cercle sphérique est réétudiée et a abouti à une modélisation paramétrique des surfaces actives en intégrant un bombé longitudinal. Afin de garantir un certain niveau de qualité de l'engrènement, il est nécessaire de limiter les variations inhérentes au procédé de forgeage et aux ressources de fabrication, il s'agit de l'analyse et de la synthèse des tolérances. Cette analyse a nécessité une modélisation géométrique des engrenages incluant les écarts intrinsèques et les écarts de situation. L'analyse de l'impact de ces écarts sur l'erreur cinématique (Tooth Contact Analysis) repose sur la résolution d'un système d'équations non linéaires pour chaque position du pignon et d'un traitement de ces résultats; la difficulté de cette analyse est la grande sensibilité des résultats aux écarts. Cet outil «TCA» est le module principal de l'analyse des tolérances qui est réalisée de façon statistique par simulation de Monte Carlo. L'analyse des tolérances permet de valider une solution d'allocation de celles-ci mais ne permet pas son allocation automatique. Ainsi une approche de synthèse des tolérances a été validée, il s'agit de l'optimisation par algorithme génétique où la fonction objectif est de minimiser le ratio coût des tolérances sur la probabilité de respect des exigences. Cette analyse et cette synthèse ont été menées dans un premier temps sans charge, en considérant l'engrenage comme indéformable. Puis, la prise en compte des déformations est réalisée par la méthode des coefficients d'influences. Le problème de contact et de déformation globale de la denture sont découplés. Les coefficients d'influences de contact sont estimés par la méthode de Boussinesq et Cerruti. Les coefficients d'influence de flexion sont estimés par interpolation et méthode des éléments finis. Ce modèle permet l'analyse de l'engrènement sous charge mais les temps de calculs restent un handicap pour l'analyse des tolérances. Ces modèles de comportement pourront être affinés dans de futurs travaux et être le support de nouveaux modèles de spécification des engrenages, de suivi du processus de fabrication, d'une meilleure connaissance des interactions géométrie-mécanique-matériau, etc.

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Gear stress analysis and understanding the effect of misalignment and microgeometry is important for gear designers and for those who work in gear maintenance. The misalignment can lead to the higher stress acting in one side of the gear tooth and the micro-geometry modification can improve the stress distribution in the gear teeth. In this research, a helical gear pair was modeled using three different software and tools; LDP, KISSsoft and Abaqus. Three different cases were modeled to study the effect of misalignment and microgeometry. Finally, the results from different tools were presented and discussed. It was observed that the tooth contact analysis software resulted in significantly higher stresses than the FE software. The results have been discussed to understand the differences in the cases obtained from the used tools. The results showed how bad is the effect of the misalignment on the gear mesh and the stress distribution and how the microgeometry modifications are used to compensate that effect.

Contact is one of the most challenging nonlinearities to solve in solid mechanics. In traditional linear finite element analysis, the contact surface is only C^0 continuous, as a result, the normal to the contact surface is not continuous. The normal contact force is directed along the normal in the direction of the contact surface, and therefore, the contact force is discontinuous. This issue is tackled in linear finite element analysis using various surface smoothing techniques, however, a better solution is to use isogeometric analysis where the solution space is spanned by smooth spline basis functions. Unfortunately, spline-based isogeometric contact analysis still has limited applicability to industrial computer aided design (CAD) representations. Building analysis suitable mesh from the industrial CAD representations has been a major bottleneck of the computer aided engineering workflow. One promising alternative field of study, intended to address this challenge, is called the immersed finite element method. In this method, the original CAD domain is immersed in a rectilinear grid called the background mesh. This cuts down the model preparation and the mesh generation time from the original CAD domain, but the method suffers from limited accuracy issues. In this dissertation, the original CAD domain is immersed in an envelope domain which can be of arbitrary topological and geometric complexity and can approximate none, some or all of the features of the original CAD domain. Therefore, the method, called the flex representation method, is much more flexible than the traditional immersed finite element method. Within the framework of the flex representation method, a robust and accurate contact search algorithm is developed, that efficiently computes the collision points between the contacting surfaces in a discrete setting. With this information at hand, a penalty based formulation is derived to enforce the contact constraint weakly for multibody and self-contact problems. In addition, the contact algorithm is used to solve various proof-of-concept academic problems and some real world industrial problems to demonstrate the validity and robustness of the algorithms.