Approach for simulating ball bearing screws in thermal finite element

When simulating the thermal behaviour of a machine tool and its components the everlasting question arises: how to simulate the motion of the structure? Beside the approach of continuously re-meshing it is particularly interesting to use a static mesh at a conceptual stage of the design phase. That gives the engineer a fast response time of the model if he tries to play around with model parameters. The contribution to the workshop will describe an approach which uses finite element models with little nodes and elements. It will be shown how to connect the appropriate parts in the model, which parameters are used for the coupling and how to connect them to get a motion-like thermal load. Furthermore it will be described how to implement this model into a complex model of a machine tool. The used FE software is Ansys, but the general approach can be transferred to any FE software.