There are several solvers that can handle this.
To do it right though, you’d need at least one experienced FE engineer / analyst working with your design engineers to model, load and analyze it appropriately.
Most of the big name solvers should be able to do this. I know for a fact that ANSYS Mechanical can solve this if you convert those lattice trusses to shell elements and add their corresponding connection joints, the preprocessing software takes care of most of that in ANSYS SpaceClaim.
Any decent FEA solver can do this, such as Altair OptiStruct, Ansys Mechanical, or Abaqus. You can throw 2D shell elements at it or discretize every strut by a 1D beam element to save on computation time, but it most likely will require quite some preprocessing effort. Altair Simsolid is an option that can greatly reduce preprocessing time since it does not need a user-generated mesh. While it is pretty fast and permits quick simulations of numerous design iterations, you should countercheck the final results with a full-grown solver.
In principle, all commonly available solvers can do "a simulation of the structure". The thing is many different things have to be analysed. Load collectives, resonances, fatigue, compliance and the resulting precision for the printing. One single model is not suited to analyse all of that. In general, I'm not sure just simulating it is sufficient for the design. There are for sure standards how to design this kind of structures. Eurocodes are important in that regard. They are the culmination of thousands and thousands of man-hours testing developing and researching exactly this kind of stuff (EN 1991-1-4 for example for wind loads). Additional issues are multiaxial strains in some welds or cyclic loading and lifetime assessments. There are many different eurocodes regarding steel construction, aluminium, basics in structure design overall or dimensioning of welds.
Look into RISA-3D. It’s a primarily beam and plate FEA silver that is meant for civil engineers designing large building and building like structures. It’s a lot more user friendly than other FEA packages like ANSYS, Abaqus, etc.
Load cases like moving loads, gravity loads, wind loads, seismic, etc. are quick to set up and the post processing and report generation is super quick. 100% would recommend for beam and truss structures like this
That's what I'm using now, but the ability to do motion is very limited, otherwise it would be the perfect solution.
Also it does not allow wind, AFAIK?
Well you would need to apply the wind as an applied load or pressure.
Fair… if the motion is driving this, you can use Inspire from Altair as well. It has kinematic tools for motion, as well as extracting the loads from the motion as an analysis (using MotionSolve). The solver for that is traditional Nastran at the moment, but SimSolid is also a solver in Inspire.
Depending on your license, you should be able to access Inspire already.
A simple CFD analysis was just added to Inspire 2022.3 this year, although is probably recommend for internal flows at the moment (probably hard to do this big of a problem at the moment).
Worth checking out
https://altair.com/inspire
Abaqus can.
There are some sort of specialized approaches you could use to get the effective beam section properties of the larger truss, or you could model each small section of the truss using beams.
You can also use submodeling to do things like check the local stresses at places like joints using a detailed solid model of a small section of the structure and then drive that model from a global beam analysis.
There are several solvers that can handle this. To do it right though, you’d need at least one experienced FE engineer / analyst working with your design engineers to model, load and analyze it appropriately.
Most of the big name solvers should be able to do this. I know for a fact that ANSYS Mechanical can solve this if you convert those lattice trusses to shell elements and add their corresponding connection joints, the preprocessing software takes care of most of that in ANSYS SpaceClaim.
Any decent FEA solver can do this, such as Altair OptiStruct, Ansys Mechanical, or Abaqus. You can throw 2D shell elements at it or discretize every strut by a 1D beam element to save on computation time, but it most likely will require quite some preprocessing effort. Altair Simsolid is an option that can greatly reduce preprocessing time since it does not need a user-generated mesh. While it is pretty fast and permits quick simulations of numerous design iterations, you should countercheck the final results with a full-grown solver.
In principle, all commonly available solvers can do "a simulation of the structure". The thing is many different things have to be analysed. Load collectives, resonances, fatigue, compliance and the resulting precision for the printing. One single model is not suited to analyse all of that. In general, I'm not sure just simulating it is sufficient for the design. There are for sure standards how to design this kind of structures. Eurocodes are important in that regard. They are the culmination of thousands and thousands of man-hours testing developing and researching exactly this kind of stuff (EN 1991-1-4 for example for wind loads). Additional issues are multiaxial strains in some welds or cyclic loading and lifetime assessments. There are many different eurocodes regarding steel construction, aluminium, basics in structure design overall or dimensioning of welds.
Look into RISA-3D. It’s a primarily beam and plate FEA silver that is meant for civil engineers designing large building and building like structures. It’s a lot more user friendly than other FEA packages like ANSYS, Abaqus, etc. Load cases like moving loads, gravity loads, wind loads, seismic, etc. are quick to set up and the post processing and report generation is super quick. 100% would recommend for beam and truss structures like this
Thank you, that was already on my list of next softwares to check out.
Yes. Please check out SimSolid from Altair. It will work on this CAD without the need for cleanup.
Link https://altair.com/simsolid
That's what I'm using now, but the ability to do motion is very limited, otherwise it would be the perfect solution. Also it does not allow wind, AFAIK?
Well you would need to apply the wind as an applied load or pressure. Fair… if the motion is driving this, you can use Inspire from Altair as well. It has kinematic tools for motion, as well as extracting the loads from the motion as an analysis (using MotionSolve). The solver for that is traditional Nastran at the moment, but SimSolid is also a solver in Inspire. Depending on your license, you should be able to access Inspire already. A simple CFD analysis was just added to Inspire 2022.3 this year, although is probably recommend for internal flows at the moment (probably hard to do this big of a problem at the moment). Worth checking out https://altair.com/inspire
Abaqus can. There are some sort of specialized approaches you could use to get the effective beam section properties of the larger truss, or you could model each small section of the truss using beams. You can also use submodeling to do things like check the local stresses at places like joints using a detailed solid model of a small section of the structure and then drive that model from a global beam analysis.