Dear All

I am modeling a workpiece supported in fixtures and being machined. I use the FEM ( Ansys) to simulate this set up. I need to know at the stiffness of wp at the wp-fixture contact point  . Stiffness is found by applying unit force at one contact point while fixing all others.. Inverse of displaceemnt gives the stiffness in that direction. I have two questions reg this.

1. I can use the element death technique to model the material removed for each cut. Let the original material be of 100 mm height and 20 mm is removed in 4 strokes ( 5 mm in each stroke of the cutter). Let the stiffness be 'k' units after this removal. Now if a take a virgin wp of height 100-20= 80 mm, will the stiffness be the same 'k' or different?

Hi

Am working on an optimization problem which requires interfacing of Ansys and MATLAB. The optimization algorithm written in MATLAB has to send input values to Ansys, get back results and process it. The cycle continues till optimal value is reached. Can any1 please help me in doing this? Thanks in advance.