Floor panel modeled with 2-d shell elements in Hypermesh

Objective: To model the given floor panel geometry using 2-d shell mesh in Hypermesh.

Quality criteria:

S.N	Quality Criteria	Value
1	Aspect Ratio	5
2	Skewness	45
3	Warping	15
4	Taper	0.5
5	Min. Length	2mm
6	Max. Length	8mm
7	Min angle Quad	45
8	Max angle Quad	135
9	Min angle Tria	20
10	Max angle Tria	120
10	Tria %	10

Procedure:

1. Open the given Floor panel geometry in Hypermesh.
2. Switch to topo mode to see the surface connectivity and Solids. Delete the solids. The imported geometry has missing surfaces. These surfaces need to be reconstructed during geometry clean-up.
3. Measure the Parent CAD in different regions to understand the thickness variation across the whole Geometry. In this case, the geometry was found to having a thickness ranging from 0.7 to 0.8 mm and thus an average thickness of 0.75 mm was assumed for the mid-surface.
4. Generate the mid-surface using the auto- mid surface option. The auto mid-surface option will create most of the mid-surfaces, but some of the faces will be missing. Create these surfaces using the final edit option under the auto mid or the offset option under the surface edit tool in the geometry menu. Clean the generated mid-surfaces and assign a property card to the component holding the complete mid-surface. Do not forget to enter the assumed thickness of 0.75 mm in the assigned property.
5. Define the required Quality criteria by editing the Criteria settings under the check element option under the tools menu. The short cut key for this is the F10 key on the keyboard.
6. Mesh the geometry using the auto mesh panel. Set the target element length as 5 mm and the element type as mixed, to avoid rotating quads as far as possible. While meshing, try to reduce the number of trias in the model. Note: Some of the regions of the mid-surface are symmetric. Be sure that you make use of this symmetry for reducing the time for modeling and to get a symmetric mesh of both halves of the geometry.
7. Check the model for quality by using the Quality index option under the 2d menu in Hypermesh. The Quality index option compares the generated elements of the mesh, with the desired criteria entered by the user and highlights the elements failing the criteria. Clear the quality for all elements without compromising much with the feature capturing.
8. Now the mid-surface is completely modeled. To view it with thickness, enable the 2d detailed representation from the element representation options provided on Hypermesh.

Result:

1. The floor panel was modeled using 2d shell elements(Quads and trias).
2. Thickness was assigned to the mesh.
3. The mesh was cleared for quality.

Find the completed file here