Roller Chain Chaos!!!

[chemicalboy]

I didn't believe it when i found that autodesk inventor didn't have a detailed view of roller chain belt!! What would I do to make a manual roller chain belt and link it to the driving sprockets????? (I tried making the chains manually and linking them to eachother without making patterns because the patterns make the belt fixed) but I couldn't manage to make the relations between the chain and sprocket...can any1 help??

[shift1313]

its a very complicated headache creating problem. I spent a lot of time drawing a chain for one of my designs but i gave up driving it. You will end up faking it i believe by adding a relation between the sprockets and driving the chain links along a path.

[kencaz]

I think the only way you could possibly get it to work is through contact sets between the sprocket and the chain pins. Closing the chain and driving one of the sprockets, although having that many contact sets calculating would probably crash my computer...

 

I have not tried it yet, however, it's probably easier then driving a belt...

 

KC

[chemicalboy]

I need to make something like this:

 

or like this: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/3962156/animated_chain_with_inventor_studio_autodesk_inventor_2010/

[shift1313]

I started playing with this a bit earlier this evening before I had to go back to work and I think I found a work around that may at least give you something to start with. Basically I started with a block that has an oval section that the chain rollers contact. I added a transitional constraint between each roller(so far) and the face(you may need to look up transitional constraint in the help file to understand). So far it lets me pull the chain around the outside of the solid block. What im hoping it will let me do is Hide the solid but by no suppressing it im hoping the constraint will still be valid. You can see the bottom 10 links or so start to arc around. This ends up adding a lot of constraints but it may be a good way to do this. In the end you would have to manually synchronize the chain motion with the sprockets because they wouldnt actually drive the chain. If i work on it more/ get it to work i will let you know. Also if you look in my feature tree you can see each "link" set has 10 parts so this adds up to a lot of parts moving which really puts a bind on teh system. If you are playing with this you may want to just use one end link and the rollers because updates will take awhile.

[vertical horizons]

...You will end up faking it...

 

 

Yes, and it is a very tiring task.

 

However, I needed to show a chain and sprocket assembly, and it didn't require animation. So this worked for me.

 

I made two sub-assemblies. One of them, the links were closer to each other than the other sub-assembly. Then it was just a matter of taking your time to set it up.

And because I was also using a "tension pulley", this allowed me to take up any slack, so that there wouldn't be any room left over in the chain.

[JD Mather]

A couple of my students have animated chains over the years and I can only comment that it isn't worth the effort.

If you have Dynamic Simulation there is a method presented in this book http://www.vdssolutions.co.uk/ but still I question the effort as what is the point? You can still animate the sprockets with correct motion - the chain simply takes up a known volume along a path.

 

Years ago one of my students even animated with the catenary curve droop on a slack chain. I saw someone else animate the chain straighten and then slack as rotation started/stopped. Pretty picture stuff, but I can tell you it brought the computer to it

s knees. The kind of thing where you fudge the animation to look right overnight, but don't sit there and watch it happen in real time.

 

There is also an add-in for populating the links (standard roller chain) along a path (but the work to create DS joints or adaptive assembly constraints is still left to the user.