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Modeling an inflatable structure

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Hi Comsol friends,

I've a two-part question about appropriately setting up a model of what is essentially a balloon that could be inflated with air, jello, etc. Suppose it will look like a sphere and I am eventually interested in knowing how it deforms if I were to poke it from the outside.

1. If I want to ignore the inflation process itself and start with the fully inflated structure, and I know what the internal pressure should be, how do I appropriately specify the pressurization boundary conditions and constraints?

2. Given the structure initialized in (1), how do I then appropriately apply forces to the exterior and observe how the material would deform. My main concern here is that I eventually want to model the structure as being a latex balloon filled with something like jello, and I'm not sure if I need to invoke FSI for this if there is a clever way of just treating the whole structure as one kind of material with well defined boundaries to handle pressurization.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Best,

D

1 Reply Last Post 16.03.2012, 11:50 GMT-4
Nagi Elabbasi Facebook Reality Labs

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Posted: 1 decade ago 16.03.2012, 11:50 GMT-4
Interesting problem. It is better in my opinion to model as FSI. You can apply the pressure correctly without FSI and get the proper deformed balloon shape. However, when you poke it from the outside the compressibility of the trapped fluid is what governs the deformation.

Nagi Elabbasi
Veryst Engineering
Interesting problem. It is better in my opinion to model as FSI. You can apply the pressure correctly without FSI and get the proper deformed balloon shape. However, when you poke it from the outside the compressibility of the trapped fluid is what governs the deformation. Nagi Elabbasi Veryst Engineering

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