In this case no contact regions have been defined as the Edge-Face contact has been disabled as a default option.
When the geometry is imported into Mechanical we can immediately see that the bodies comprising this assembly aren’t unified within a single Multibody part. The geometry is now ready to be sent through to Mechanical for meshing. Apply these changes.ģ. When hiding adjacent bodies you will now see the imprinted edges on parent faces (see bottom image). The first order of business is to imprint any edges which are in contact with adjacent faces, forcing the Mechanical mesher to place nodes on both sides of interface regions.Ģ. Choose the Imprint button – this will detect any face/edge pairs which are within a user nominated tolerance and highlight them in red. Looking over the bracket, we can see that although the parts appear to be connected together, upon hiding the central stiffener, there are no imprinted edges where the intersection occurs with the parent material: We will be explaining the procedure using the bracket shown below:
The following steps aim to demonstrate the implementation of the key points outlined above. Merge adjacent nodes together using the Node Merge feature.Apply edge sizing to all imprinted edges ( this step isn’t mandatory, however it will create cleaner connections in Mechanical) and then generate the mesh.Import geometry into Mechanical, delete any contact regions generated in locations intended for mesh connections.Imprint mid-surface faces using Spaceclaim Direct Modeler.The overall procedure involved in this new workflow is: The addition of these features produces an entirely new workflow for fabricated structures, allowing node-node connectivity in fabricated shell structures while making use of parallel meshing. Detach operation added to SCDM and DM which can be used to split large surface bodies into multiple surface bodies for an improved local control of the mesh.Weld Tool added to SCDM and DM to create weld bodies connecting adjacent surfaces.The ability to display element quality on geometry as a contour plot.Imprint tool in SpaceClaim to assist with the mesh connections approach to fabricated structures.Mesh edit tools for creating mesh connections post mesh generation.Improved shell meshing for better structured meshes.Over the course of these two releases, a number of new features have been implemented: Introduced in R16 and refined in R17, ANSYS Inc have introduced a suite of tools focussed on “mesh editing” which work to enhance the workflow associated with meshing and connecting fabricated structures. Given that customers in the maritime, aviation and defence industries all utilised Multibody parts to connect shell assemblies, this was a pretty big drawback. One of the limitations to this new feature was the fact that Multibody parts were still meshed in serial. Structures which took hours to mesh now wrapped up in minutes, unfortunately removing one of our favourite excuses for taking a tactical nap. The introduction of parallel part-by-part meshing to ANSYS Mechanical 15 back in 2013 was revolutionary.