COSMOS meshing control and quality

[jpjamo]

Hi all,

Doing some testing with COSMOSworks (after toying with xPress a little) for the first time - going through tutorials and doing as much web scanning of any relevent tips I can find.

One issue I have is that on a part I can apply a mesh control to locally reduce the mesh size however if I want to locally increase the size of a mesh it just sticks to to the global mesh size (which is smaller).
The main reason I want to do this is for the majority of a particular part I want a smallish size mesh - however on the part I have modelled in a smooth chunk (to represent an undeformable chunk) that I want to apply a largish mesh on as it doesn't need to be as fine as elsewhere.

I think I could model the chunk as a seperate part and perform the FEA on the assembly of the two parts but I thought the mesh control should be able to handle this?

Also does anyone have some good techniques for mesh analysis - the only way I have found is to right click "mesh" and pick "details" where you can see aspect ratio above 10 and below 3 - is there any visual way to see the poor elements on the part?

Thanks heaps!

James

 

[Nella95]

I want an answer to the 'pick and choose' 'mesh analysis' question, myself.

 

[jpjamo]

Hi there,

have answered Q1 myself - using a mesh control COSMOS cannot locally enlarge a mesh to be larger the the global definition - it can ONLY refine. It can however using the h-adaptive strategy make a mesh both refined where it needs to be and coarser aswell.

Have still not found a nice way of showing graphically mesh quality. In reading Solidworks 2006 COSMOS notes they talk about "invisible meshing" - ie removing any need I presume for the user to even know what the mesh is like at all. Not such a good idea I feel - I think you should still have the option of choosing to see the mesh details if you want.

Anyhow - so far it seems not too bad so will progress with eval!

Cheers
James