FINITE ELEMENT METHOD FOR THE STRESS ANALYSIS OF SAW BLADES

Abstract

Much attention is devoted to the development and testing of four plane stress/strain finite element programs. Two basic programs use three nodal and six nodal triangular elements in conjunction with the method of partitions. Centrifugal force discretization is incorporated in the program. To aid in the study of the stress field contour plots are drawn by computer. Problems of increasing degrees of sophistication are solved using these programs. The problem of special interest is the fatigue stress analysis of a slotted circular saw blade. A theory for the cutting force distribution is developed, and a program for automatic mesh generation is described. Two different slot shapes that may improve the fatigue life of the saw blade are found.