An analysis of bolted opening structure and development of analysis expert system using ANSYS

Bolted opening structures is widely applied for class 1 machinery of nuclear plant with strict design requirement. As the shape of the bolted opening structure is non-axisymmetric due to the existence of stud bolts although it is almost axi-symmetric, 3D analysis is required to satisfy such kind of design requirements. Because as much as possible trial computations are need to get an optimal design condition in the limited period of basic design, an easy and fast analysis tool is useful in the design stage. In the paper, a transformation technique of non-axisymmetric problem into quasi-axisymmetric has been proposed based on the general purpose commercial code ANSYS. Both the pre-processor which incorporates the technique and prepares data and post-processor which prepares arranged results from the huge output of commercial code have been developed to help the design engineers. (author)