Dear Reader,

Happy weekend! I hope you had a productive week. I will go directly into the contents of the newsletter for today, which are as follows:

1. Technical Reflections: How to trim boundary particles/fibres
2. Behind the Scenes at CM Videos: Videos hiatus
3. Quote for the Week: YouTube Vs Traditional TVs

Technical Reflections

How to trim boundary fibres/particles/materials in an RVE

This week, I was asked precisely the above question by a viewer on my YouTube channel. It was very coincidental as I have been dealing with the same issue as part of a code development I am working on. If you want to follow my code development efforts and be the first to know when new software products are launched, then click here to join the waiting list.

The Problem: You have created say a particulate composite with random distribution of fibres. However, some of the edge/boundary fibres need to be trimmed off so that you will not worry about them during further analysis. One particular constraint is that you do not want all the particles merged and treated as a single part. This might be because you want to specify say interface properties to regions between the fibre and matrix constituents.

How do I solve this? The way to solve this problem is to use the power of the Extrude-cut button available in ABAQUS Part module interface. Below is a three step process for achieving this and this is illustrated too.

• Step 1: Manually sketch the problem: It makes sense as you start to sketch what the problem would look like, finding the right coordinates for the inclusions (Particles and voids) and where you need to insert the cutting plane to trim off the boundary particles.

• Step 1: Datum Planes and Axes: For each part that needs to be trimmed, you have to work within the Part module for it. First, add coordinates points according to the specific locations shown in your sketch above. In this case, it is for three orthogonal points: [20,20,20], [20,0,20] and [20,0,0]. With these coordinates, you will have to generate the Datum axis (using method of two points) and datum planes (using method of three orthogonal points) as shown above. These datum plane and axis will serve as plane and directions for extrude cutting through the material.

• Step 3: The Power of Extrude cut: The last part is where you use the Extrude-cut option in ABAQUS to trim the entity. In this instance, I used it to trim three individual components - spheres, ellipses and a cylinder. As they were not supposed to be merged, I had to do it individually for each particle but when they are introduced into the Assembly module, they will appear cut as shown below. The plane for the extrude-cut is the datum plane while the direction of extrude cut is defined by the datum axis. In the end, the results below was achieved. Subsequently, the matrix (the box) was added showing clearly the particles locked inside the matrix and all edge entities successfully trimmed off.

Please let me know if this is something you are dealing with. You can contact me via a reply to this email or contact me via my social media platforms. It is my intention to make a video where I show this but I wanted to discuss it with you first and gauge interest in this specific, non-trivial problem.

Behind the Scenes at CM Videos

Videos hiatus: No published videos in nearly a month

This is not normal for me since I started posting on the YouTube channel. For nearly a month now, I have simply posted one content. You might have noticed and wondering, hence my writing about this.

• First, I have not fallen out of love for YouTube, if anything I find more reasons why I should be making these videos.
• Secondly, I have been working on a code to create particulate systems in 3D and the programming effort has been taking most of my time. Its been so intense that I have not had any intention to break it off and do some video editting.
• It is also a season during my teaching year that I am the busiest so something had to give.
• In spite of all these, the channels continues to see good watch times and in March, I had my longest watch time (702 hours) and largest view counts (12,500 views) per month since the start of the channel.

Things are getting quieter now and I will revert back to make contents more regularly. Thanks for the patience you have shown.

Quote for the week

YouTube Vs Traditional TVs

I am subscribed to this newsletter called: The Publish Press by YouTube content creators Colin and Samir. In a recent newsletter titled: How creators are using AI, they explored also the impact YouTube is having on traditional TVs. Here is my quote, taken from their newsletter:

What I thought was interesting from the article and this shaped my choice of it as my quote for the wek are as follows:

• YouTube is not going away and is rivalling traditional TVs competently.
• If you are a creator on YouTube, then you are in a good place as more eyes are turning towards it.
• I am happy that I am part of this emerging creator-led programming framework.
• I will encourage anyone thinking about sharing their work to try doing so on the YouTube platform as that will help create impact fom your study.

So, here is the end of the newsletter. Let me know what you think of the issues discussed here.

Catch up with you next week and bye!