Learning Forum

[srh11]

Hey guys,

I have the mesh of a specimen in STL format I am using for 3D printing. This mesh is made of shells. For performing the finite element analysis of this specimen, I need the meshing to be in the form of solid mesh. Is there a way to achieve this in Ansys Student Version? I have attached the pictures of the mesh (full and cut version). 

I have tried converting the mesh to solid in FreeCAD and Inventor, but due to the complexity of the model, I have not been able to import and convert it to a mesh as the computational time is too high. I have also tried using Meshmixer to make the hollow mesh, solid but it did not work.I was wondering if there was a simple way to achieve this directly in Ansys. Any suggestions would be very helpful. 

  

[Rob]

How did you generate the model to convert to stl for printing?  

[peteroznewman]

@srh11, when you say "I have the mesh of a specimen in STL format" I don't think you mean a finite element mesh, you mean the faceted geometry of the specimen that is used for printing.  It doesn't help when you add "This mesh is made of shells", again, I don't think you mean finite element shell elements, but I don't know what you mean.

ANSYS SpaceClaim Direct Modeler (SCDM) is the default geometry editor that comes with the Student license and it can open STL files and represent the facet body.  There are tools to convert the facet body to a solid body. However, the Student license has a limit of 300 faces, so you can't save a direct conversion of STL facet body to solid body because you will exceed the face limit.

If you have an Academic license provided through your University, then there is no face limit and you can use SpaceClaim to edit the solid body, merge faces and generally clean up the geometry so it is suitable for meshing the solid body.