Have a large assembly that's been giving me fits. Was meshing and solving fine until I made a change to the assembly a few weeks ago. Was having a heck of a time getting the assembly to mesh with the new parts. Even after removing the parts, I couldn't get the assembly to mesh in its original form. Spent several hours troubleshooting and just ended up having to rebuild the FEA version of my model. Got it meshing and executing the FEA solver. This was using SW2010 SP 4.0 on my old XP 64 bit machine.
We did a new computer build to a WIN7 machine. I transferred the assembly to the new computer, and everything was meshing and solving quite nicely. I was happy with the performance increase with faster mesh times and solving times. I made a change to the model and introduced some new parts. The assembly meshed fine, however, during the FEA run, but I kept getting the "Status Code: 9" error messaged. Tried running the FEA with the intertia relief and soft springs flags turned on to no avail. Did some digging in the forums, and noticed my assembly was "under defined". I found a floating part in the assembly and constrained it so the assembly was now "fully defined". Re-ran the study, and still was getting the Status Code 9 error message. I removed the parts I added and still get the message. I went back to the original study (I had a few tabs of different studies looking at various loading conditions) and still get the message.
I ran the SW cleanup tool to clean out any old temp files, including CHKDSK. I also deleted all the old studies, and created a new study. None of these actions appeared to have worked.
Some things of note:
1) That floating part may have been present all along...and yet it seemed to run successfully at times. No noted anomalies when looking at the displacement charts.
2) Does it seem like the more you tweak with a large assembly, the more problems that seem to arise on the FEA side?
I'd hate to pack-n-go the model every time I have a minor revision that I follow up with an FEA run, but it seems that once a study gets "corrupted" or whatever the case may be, it hoses all your previous studies.
Any thoughts or similar experiences here?