Learning Forum

[Leo Cheng]

I have a hull model with a lot of beams and I would like to have a more accurate analysis, I would like to use shell elements rather than beam elements to represent the webs and girders and generate meshes at the webs and girders. However, I have not yet found a way to simply transfer the beam elements to the shell elements. can Spaceclaim do this? Or do I have to pull each web and girder myself?

Thanks for the reply!

[John Doyle]

I am not aware of an automatic way to do this.  Shells are designed for thin plate theory and are intended to be meshed to surface bodies.  Beams are designed for beam theory and are intended to be meshed to line bodies.  You need to create the surface bodies that represent the webs and girder details of your "beams" in order to  represent them with shells. 

[Aniket]

There could be a way of doing this, After Suppressing all the shells, take the model from SpaceClaim to Mechanical (static structural/modal), mesh it, as fine as you can, add 0 displacements to all faces and edges, and solve this. After solving this, add a total deformation result. Which should be all zeros ideally. 

Make sure that you have show mesh and thick shell beams turned on, and export the results from here as STL.

This STL can be brought back in SpaceClaim, then you can use Shrinkwrap in Facets tool and convert this to solid. This would work better for rectangular crosssections as compared to circular ones though.

 

-Aniket

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[william Lucking]

submodeling can do this