Guidelines for Retained Meshes
If you configured your session to use retained meshing, make sure that you have completed the following tasks prior to meshing a part or an assembly:
• Simplified the part or assembly to remove features unnecessary for finite element analysis
• Suppressed any geometry whose only purpose is to serve as a vehicle for meshing a particular element type—for example, a solid used for placement of bar elements
• Added surface and volume regions
• Added any loads and boundary conditions that reference datum points
• Added any idealizations that could affect the mesh
• For shell-meshed features:
◦ created the appropriate shell model by defining all surface pairs
◦ defined idealizations to represent bars, weld elements, and contacts
• Suppressed all geometry features modeled as bar elements—for example, a bar element that serves as a strut
• Established
connections between any load-transmitting surfaces or edges that do not touch or overlap
◦ created all
hard points required to properly connect pre-meshed assembly components
◦ established connections between all load-transmitting surfaces or edges on pre-meshed components, whether or not the surfaces or edges touch
◦ applied mesh controls to resolve any node and element numbering conflicts
• Applied the appropriate
mesh controls to control the characteristics of the mesh
• Optionally set up any predefined criteria in the
configuration file against which to evaluate the quality of the mesh
See
Troubleshooting FEM Mesh Generation for help with mesh-generation problems.