Learning Forum

[matahari]

Hello everyone,

when is it beneficial to model a problem as a 2D solid instead of 3D surface body? As far as I understand 2D solid has limitation in that it can't have out-of-plane bending, whereas surface body can deal with warpage. I simulated a plane stress problem both as a 2D solid and surface body, and the mesh quality was virtually identical, but surface body had almost 3 times less nodes than 2D solid. What advantage of 2D solid am I missing?

[peteroznewman]

Each node on a 3D surface body has 6 degrees of freedom (DOF).

Each node on a 2D plane strain model has 2 DOF.

Therefore a 3D surface of the same mesh would have 3 times more equations to solve.

That is one advantage to a 2D model.

[matahari]

Thank you!