Finite Element Meshing Tools

[Jorgen]

http://polymerfem.com/polymer_files/topics/q.gif
I am currently working on a big FE simulation project of a polymer product. The goal of this project is to simulate both impact and different dynamic conditions of a viscoplastic polymer. To accomplish this I am using a user material subroutine in order to capture the non-linear, time-dependent response of the material. One of the significant challenges that I am still working on is to simplify the generation of the FE mesh. For this particular project I have spent more than 80% of the budget on creating the mesh from available CAD files. We used TrueGrid to create the mesh, it worked great but it was very time consuming. What software programs do you recommend for creating the FE meshes when the geometry is available as CAD files?

Which programs have you tried? What works the best? What is fastest?

Post a comment below if you have any comments or suggestions!

[Jorgen]

One powerful approach is to use TrueGrid (http://truegrid.com). This is an advanced program than can create very nice meshes, but manually intensive and somewhat tricky to learn.

[Jorgen]

For those of you interested in meshing, I have also received the following recommendations:

* Hypermesh from ALTAIR Engineering Inc (http://www.altair.com) is good for meshing surfaces (which involves surfaces and extruding etc)
* FEMAP is good for volume meshing.
* ANSA but it is complex for beginners, and it’s mostly about surface meshing.

[Jorgen]

MSC.PATRAN from MSC Software Corporation (http://www.mscsoftware.com) is a very strong meshing and Pre-/Post-Processing program.

It has good import capability for most standard CAD formats like ParaSolid, ACIS, STEP, etc. and good direct access to native CAD files like CATIA and Pro-Engineer. PATRAN has a broad range of meshing tools and capabilities to repair or defeature CAD geometry. It has some nice tools for working with CAD assemblies also.

PATRAN has strong support for analysis codes like MSC.NASTRAN, MSC.MARC, LS-DYNA, ABAQUS, ANSYS, and has also been customized to support other commercial and proprietary codes.