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[Lucas]

Hi! Need help on a welded tow hitch for an off-road vehicle using S355 steel tubing and 8 mm plates. It needs to handle a 3,500 kg towing load with off-axis forces. In ANSYS, I’m seeing high stress at the weld toes, which seems mesh-dependent. Would refining the mesh be enough, or should I use sub-modeling or another method to get more accurate results? Any insights from real-world validation would be helpful.

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[Rafael Angulo]

Yeah, stress concentrations at the weld toes are pretty much expected, and they can definitely depend on the mesh. Tweaking the mesh might help, but if the high stress is more about the weld geometry itself, it might not make much of a difference.

I’d go with sub-modeling for the welds—it lets you refine the mesh in critical spots while keeping the rest coarser, so you don’t burn through unnecessary computation time. Plus, it improves accuracy. Also, don’t forget to double-check your boundary conditions and load cases since they can seriously affect the stress results.

Weld toe stresses are one of those tricky things in FEA, so if you can, real-world testing is always a good call. Strain gauges can give you some extra confidence in the design. And if this thing is going off-road, definitely keep fatigue in mind—those conditions can be brutal!

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[CommunityMember]

Making a refined mesh is a good start, but also think about how the material will behave under load with a detailed weld model. Sub-modeling and testing in the field are essential for an off-road design such as this.

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