Hi all,
Im currently working on doing analysis of the superstructure of a train carriage so its quite a large assembly of shells representing all the members of the underframe, side wall framing and roof framing. In total there are about 800 surfaces and when I go to mesh it, it zipps through all the surfaces quite quickly until the last surface in the se and then it takes about 10 hours to finish meshing completely. If I remove that last surface it then pauses on the next surface in the list that is not last. Is there anything that I am doing wrong or is it the software it sellf?
The mesh is all shell elements on draft quality mesh with about 50000 nodes.
Any help is much appreciated.
Regards
Justin
Hi Justin,
The most likely cause of this is the algorithm that aligns all non composite shell normals:
Automatic shell surface re-alignment for non-composite shells. When selected, the software automatically realigns the shell surfaces (non-composites) so that all bottom/top faces have uniform orientation. If this option is not selected, you may need to flip the misaligned shell surfaces manually. Select the desired faces, right-click the Mesh icon in the Simulation study tree and select Flip Shell Elements.
You can disable this option under Simulation options - Default Options - Meshing. Depending on what results you are looking at and the loading determines the importance of this. But as it says, you can go and manually adjust the mesh on faces to align normals too.
Let me know if that helps you out.
Cheers,
Ian