Hi everyone,

For my second year engineering project, I've had to design a bike frame (long-john type cargo bike), and am now trying to get some stress calculations done on it to see whether this design would be safe.

I looked up some tutorials on how to run a simulation, followed the steps, only to get stuck at the point of meshing the model.
Every. Time.
I lost count of the simulations I've attempted to run.

• I tried using the standard mesh. I tried setting it to the finest setting. I tried manually setting the element size to an order of magnitude less than any geometry in the model, tried using mesh control on the failing edges and faces, all to no avail. The furthest I've gone with standard mesh was letting Solidworks try to mesh the thing for 12 minutes, at which point it crashed with no results.
• I also went and edited the model, originally built from surfaces then joined and then thickened, to remove some unnecessarily complex geometry. No improvement.
• I then moved on to curvature driven mesh, and using that I can get the mesh progress indicator to start, linger for a while on 48%, move up to 96%, and then instantly fail.
• On using "Mesh failure analysis", all I get in these last few attempts under "failing bodies" is a dash with nothing written beside it.
  I've again tried setting the mesh to its finest setting, then lowered it manually again, leading only to increased memory consumption and still no mesh.

I then resorted to online tutorials and posts, without finding much in the way of useful insights.

The university's resident CAD technician has also been useless, for the second time now.

I am now resorting to the Solidworks forums in hopes to find an expert and figure this out.
I think I may have to edit the model further but I need to know what exactly is going wrong.

The frame model is attached.

Thanks in advance.

GBergamelli.