Sew: tool does not share a common boundary

[kakm]

I have two* sheets I am attempting to sew together and I am getting the alert "A tool body does not share a common boundary with any other sheet and will not be sewn". I suspect this is because the two sheets form a T-intersection. I tried increasing the length of one of the sheets by an amount greater than the tolerance of the sew operation to ensure overlap, but this did not resolve the issue.

I also tried combine, but the overall shape of the part is approximately 0-0-0, and combine will only keep the top half or the bottom half of the loops, not both.

Is there a way to create the boundaries I need at the intersection point? I tried turning on the boundary visualization, but did not see any boundaries at all.

*More precisely, I have two (interlaced) linear patterns, but every intersection is either identical or mirrored to the first.

 

[cowski]

Are you preparing a model for FEA? If so, there are tools on the FEA side for this (I think it is called "stitch").

You cannot sew the surfaces together in modeling as it is not valid geometry.

 

[kakm]

Yes, this is for FEA. I was hoping to be able to indicate that connection in the file exported to the mesher so that the mesher would recognize the connections automatically and I wouldn't have to script something, but if the math doesn't work the math doesn't work.

I do need the join to be automated because it's going to be run through an optimizer, so I can't manually fix the geometry every time it tries a new design. Unless the NX stitch tool works better than the Ansa equivalent, I think there is some scripting in my future...

Thanks for letting me know I was at a dead end!

 

[cowski]

If your FEA has an "extract midsurface" command, you might be able to thicken the sheets in NX modeling and unite them into a solid that will be usable in your FEA.