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Meshing Tips

  • When you mesh a study, the software meshes all unsuppressed solids, shells, and beams:
    • Uses Solid mesh for bulky objects.
    • Uses Shell elements for thin objects like sheet metals.
    • Uses Beam or Truss elements for extruded or revolved objects with constant cross-sections.
    • For assemblies, check component interference. To detect interference in an assembly, click Tools > Interference Detection . Interference is allowed only when using shrink fit. The Treat coincidence as interference and Include multibody part interferences options allow you to detect touching areas. Theses are the only areas affected by the global and component contact settings.
  • Compatible meshing is more accurate than incompatible meshing in the interface region. Requesting compatible meshing can cause mesh failure in some cases. Requesting incompatible meshing can result in successful results. You can request compatible meshing and select Remesh failed parts with incompatible mesh so that the software uses incompatible meshing only for bodies that fail to mesh.
  • Check for interferences between bodies when using a compatible mesh with the curvature-based mesher. If you specify a bonded contact condition between bodies, they should be touching. If interferences are detected, meshing stops, and you can access the Interference Detection PropertyManager to view the interfering parts. Make sure to resolve all interferences before you mesh again.
  • If meshing fails, use the Failure Diagnostics tool to locate the cause of mesh failure. Try the proposed options to solve the problem. You can also try different element size, define mesh control, or activate Enable automatic looping for solids.
  • The SolidWorks Simplify utility lets you suppress features that meet a specified simplification factor. In the Simulation study tree, right-click Mesh and select Simplify Model for Meshing . This displays the Simplify utility.
    Simplification of geometry can alter stress results significantly.
  • The SolidWorks Geometry Analysis utility identifies small features of a part's geometry that might fail to mesh. You can remove these insignificant geometry features, or use a mesh tolerance value slightly higher than their size. The mesher merges these nodes whose distance is smaller than this tolerance value.
  • It is good practice to check mesh options before meshing. For example, Automatic transition can result in generating an unnecessarily large number of elements for models with many small features. The high quality mesh is recommended for most cases. Automatic looping can help solve meshing problems automatically, but you can adjust its settings for a particular model. The Curvature-based mesher automatically uses smaller element sizes in regions with high curvature.
  • To improve results in important areas, use mesh control to set a smaller element size. When meshing an assembly with a wide range of component sizes, default meshing results in a relatively coarse mesh for small components. Component mesh control offers an easy way to give more importance to the selected small components. Use this option to identify important small components.
  • The curvature-based mesher supports multi-threaded surface and volume meshing for assembly and multi-body part documents. The standard mesher supports only multi-threaded volume meshing.
    For static studies, you can use the h-adaptive method to refine the mesh automatically.

Contents

  • Checking for Small Features that Fail to Mesh

    Before meshing, you can check a part’s geometry for small features that might fail to mesh such as short edges, narrow faces, small faces, sharp corners. The SolidWorks Geometry Analysis utility identifies these features.



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