Hi everyone,

i want to create a static study of a sheet metal inlet device. I have already analyzed a small portion of it to size plate thicknesses, but now i want to check loads caused by suspending the structure from the surroundings under operational conditions. the model i wanted to use for this is the "envelope" model, the mechanical engineers used to construct it. It is basically a single body part upon which they constrain all the individual sheetmetal parts. The reason i want to use this envelope is because it took a lot of time to define all the contact conditions that are missed by the global contact.

The problem is that the envelope model uses many split lines. It turns out that these split lines create short edges and vertex gaps that cause meshing to fail. I suspect that the split lines are created by projecting and intersecting the sketches onto and with the target faces, and that due to finite accuracy these short edges are created.

I have started to rebuild the envelope model to exclude the split lines, but i am wondering if there is any way to increase the quality of the split lines so that no short edges are created. I seem to remember that in Pro/E there is a possibility to regulate model accuracy, is something like that available in SolidWorks?

Thanks!

Mark

P.S.: I cannot post any pictures or models...