Automatically approximating the material properties and boundary conditions applied to a axisymmetric thermal analysis of a quasi-axisymmetric component

This paper describes an innovative method which automatically calculates the material properties and boundary conditions which must be applied to an axisymmetric Finite Element (FE) model of a quasi-axisymmetric component, to account for the fact that some regions in a quasi-axisymmetric model are not fully axisymmetric. The automated process has been implemented using the Application Programming Interface (API) of a commercial FE package and builds on an existing process which automatically creates an axisymmetric FE mesh from a 3D CAD model of a quasi-axisymmetric component. The method is demonstrated for a series of component models. For the thermal analysis of an aerospace turbine rear structure model, the FE model was created from the 3D CAD model in approximately 2 min and gave nodal temperatures within 9% of a 3D FE model.