Introduction to meshing using ANSA

Objective

The objective of this project is to mesh the model of a cylinder using ANSA software. The element size of the mesh shall be 1 unit. Another aim is to familiarise a little with the software.

Steps to follow for meshing any geometry

Open the file and turn on the shadow mode. Change from entity mode (wherein you can only see two colours) to property id (PID) mode. For separate faces, properties shall be set. Enter the presentation parameters in the quality criteria and click the box for CONS in the visualisation box so as to see the boundary lines in yellow colour. Execute cheks for the geometry. Assign properties for the geometry. Now we move onto the meshing part. We select all the edges of the geometry and change the length parameters or the mesh size from 20 to 1. Using the measure tool, it must be confirmed that the distance between any two node is approximately 1. We now move onto mesh generation using the spot mesh option and reconstructing it. The element type will be a triangular mesh. We use equilateral traingle shaped meshes because they have very good quality. Upon execution the mesh is generated.

Result

Table of Properties shows different faces of the component assigned different properties and names.

Figure 1 shows the zoomed out view of the meshed cylinder.

Figure 2 shows the zoomed in view of the meshed cylinder.

Figure 3 shows the measurement tool used to confirm the element size which was set as 1, the result is very close to 1 which is acceptable.

Conclusion

The cylinder model was meshed with element size of 1 and the result has been displayed above. The unit size displayed using the inbuilt measure function of ANSA is 0.98 and not 1 whichg is not an error as the mesh size at all the nodes are balanced and are very close to 1.