About FEM Meshes
After you define a model in the FEM mode, you can generate a finite element mesh for it. You can mesh solids, midsurfaces, and shells separately or in any combination. You can also mesh bars and mass idealizations.
Depending on how you configure your session,
Creo Simulate treats the mesh as either a
transient or retained modeling object. There are special modeling implications for both approaches, particularly if you are working with
assemblies.
Use the items on the Mesh group on the Home tab to control, generate, and check a FEM mesh. Before you create a mesh, this group contains the following active items:
• 
Control—Click the arrow adjacent to this button to open one of the mesh controls. Use this dialog box to create mesh controls. Mesh controls determine the size of the elements, numbering of nodes and elements, and so on. For submodels in an assembly, you can suppress a particular mesh control type, or all mesh control types.
• Home >
Mesh—Starts the generation of the mesh.
• 
Review Geometry—Opens the
Simulation Geometry dialog box to view the different connection types and simulation geometry for your model before meshing.
• Home >
Mesh >
Operations—Imports NASTRAN files and allows you to create specialized mesh attributes for models processed in NASTRAN.
This command is available only if the configuration option fem_mesh_operations is set to yes in the configuration options file when you start Creo Simulate. Changing this option during a session does not make this command available for the session.
The following mesh type options are available when you click
Home and then click the arrow below
Mesh. The mesh type options displayed depend on the model. For example,
Midsurface is only displayed if the model contains shells or shell pairs.
Select one of the following
Mesh types according to your model :
• Solid
• Midsurface
• Solid / Midsurface
• Shell
• Boundary
• Bar
After Creo Simulate successfully generates a mesh, the following buttons become active on the Mesh group:
• Improve—Attempts to improve the mesh. When you select
Improve, the software asks you to enter the number of additional passes you want for mesh shape improvement. After you enter the number of passes, the software tries to improve the shape of solid and shell elements and redraws the model.
• Erase—Erases all or individual meshes in the current part or assembly from the memory. This command is particularly helpful if you are working with hierarchical assembly meshing.
|  This command only erases the mesh from memory. The Erase command does not erase saved mesh files from disk. |
• Review—Opens the
Review Mesh tab so you can review meshes, nodes, or elements.
• Check Elements—Opens the
Element Quality Checks dialog box so you can check element quality.
You can
save the mesh data to a database file for later
retrieval.