2D Meshing of Floor Panel

OBJECTIVE

To 2D mesh the floor panel of the car with the given quality criteria and after meshing assign the thickness to the mesh.

PROCEDURE

The given component is a floor panel of the car . This part is a sheet metal part and so that thickness is very low. So instead of going for 3D meshing, We can go for 2D meshing. For that we need to extract the mid surface.

First step in 2D meshing is to open the hyper works software and in the interface it will ask for to select a solver, Here we select RADIOS as solver .Then we need to import the IGES file which is the CAD file of the floor panel of the car.Then we need to take the mid surface of the model. Since this is having Third dimension which is very very less magnitude. We can take the midsurface and mesh it in 2D and then we can add thickness to the mesh which is exactly same as the model.

For manual midsurfacing. first check the thickness of the components.It can be found out using the distance option by pressing F4 and then place the radio button in two points and select the two points at the extremums and that will give us the thickness of the model.Then for manual midsurfacing we can use the OFFSET option in SURFACES EDIT By pressing SHIFT+F9.Place the radio button in OFFSET and select the outer surfaces of the component and duplicate it to the current component and type the distance as half of the thickness and check the normal using vector normal option and if the vector is not in the required direction then reverse it by using the reverse normal option and hit OFFSET.That will give us the required midsurface.

fig 1 midsurface of floor panel

Some free surfaces may be presented in the imported model, some surface duplication may be seen, some glitches in the surface etc… will be present. For to remove all these issues before the process of meshing we need to do the topology clean up.Then we can start meshing the midsurface. there we can use auto mesh option in 2d panel to mesh the surface.Go to 2D PANEL> AUTOMESH>Select the surfaces needed to mesh>give the element size AS 5 MM > HIT MESH.After meshing some of the elements violates the quality criteria . This can be checked by Press F10 which is the check element tab. This can also be entered with Tool>check elements>type the quality in relevant boxes. Then click on the respective options to check whether tab elements fail or not. So we should make them follow the quality criteria by relevant tools.

fig 2 topology error in topo mode

fig 3 cleared topology error

Fig 4 Topology cleaned in wire frame mode

FIG 5 CHECKING EDGES

Then assigning the thickness to the mesh.For this we need to create property and apply thickness to it exactly same as the real component thickness .And then assign those propery to the respective component.

RESULT

Fully meshed floor panel

After assigned thickness

CONCLUSION

Complexity of the model leads to increases failing of elements for warpage as the quality criteria is stringent.

Link for the files

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Y2SZPxuhc0UP5W-hr9UKf59XSmhNTJMV?usp=sharing