Applications:

HyperMesh

HyperWorks Tip/Trick # 661

Application version:
6.0 and greater All supported

Computer hardware: Computer operating systems:

All supported Windows and UNIX Geometry: Create Geometry

Categories: Subcategories:

Topic:

Creating surfaces from a mesh

Topic details:
HyperMesh allows users to create surfaces from an existing FE mesh. You may need to create surfaces if a mesh needs to be altered or if you need to provide geometry that is based on analysis results to a CAD designer. To create a surface from a shell or solid mesh , you will: 1. 2. 3. 4. Extract faces from solid elements (optional; only if no shell elements are present) Create plot elements on the shell mesh Create the surface Export the surface

Surfaces can be created from shell or solid meshes. This document provides information on how to create surfaces. 1. Extract faces from the solid elements. The FE surf panel creates surfaces from shell elements. If there are no shell elements, you need to create shell elements (faces) on the exterior of the solids. To create the shell elements, use the faces panel on the Tool page. 2. Create plot elements on the shell mesh. Depending on the part, you may need to break up the mesh into regions that have simple shapes. Create plot elements to break up the mesh. The plot elements indicate the boundaries of each surface to the FE surf surface generator. It is recommended that closed loops of plot elements be formed to obtain well-defined surfaces. Use the features panel on the Tool page to create plot elements. The features subpanel provides an automated way of creating plot elements, based on the angle between adjacent shell elements Altair Engineering 2005 Page 1
Proprietary Information of Altair Engineering.

(feature angle). A low feature angle creates many plot elements, while a high feature angle creates fewer plot elements. The edit subpanel allows you to manually create, edit, or delete plot elements. 3. Create the surface(s). To create the surfaces, use the FE surf panel on the Post or the Geom page. Select the elements from which you want to create the surfaces using shell elements defining surface:. Use plot elements defining edges:, to select the plot elements created in Step #2 which represent the surface boundaries. There are a couple of options that can be used to control the surface creation. The surface complexity option determines how complex the created surfaces can be when trying to capture curved features. This can have a value between 1 (simple) and 10 (complex). There is also a toggle between mesh based auto tolerance and tolerance to control how closely the surfaces adhere to the mesh. 4. Export surface(s). Use the export subpanel of the files panel to save the geometry in IGES format. Note If you would like to create a large number of surfaces from elements and computation time is critical, HyperMesh offers the OSSmooth tool. For more information on OSSmooth, refer to the HyperMesh online help.

Author:.

Altair HyperWorks Technical Support Group (am)

Date this entry was last reviewed:

July, 2005

Altair Engineering 2005

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