Blog Post 25: FEA and Motion Study for Concept 1 - Handle Base + Attachment

I ran FEA on both parts of the revised handle after separating it into two parts and applying material reduction. As you can see there was no adverse effect on the structural integrity of the device despite eliminating 14% of the main body and 22% of the attachment.

Main Body:

I have decided that adopting the detachable handle design is the most viable way of ensuring all the needs of the end user are met, so I carried out FEA on the two new components separately. The results above show stress distribution around the dowel path when I applied 5 Nm of torque to the handle’s main body. Naturally, geometry at this point was fixed to simulate the force endured before the jar lid gives way, when the gear dowel will effectively be static.

Note: excess material has been removed from the centre of the component (14%) leaving a 60 taper leading to the gear dowel on both sides. I did this not only to keep device weight to a minimum, but also to make space for a spring/motion limiter mount at the bottom of the enclosure.

Attachment:

From these results you can see how the attachment for Handle v2 handled the simulated force that will be exerted by the user when fixed to the main body. For this study, the fixed geometry was located along the female path of the insert on the main body so that I could assess the viability of the insert as a key structural element. The results indicate that this insert is suitable for its intended use.