Meshing Floor panel of an automobile using Hypermesh

Objective- Perform meshing on the Floor panel geometry of a car using Hypermesh.

Procedure

• Import the .stp file.

• Organize all the components to collector using tool>organize>collector

• Measure the distance between the surfaces using geom>distance

• Create washer split using geom>quick edit>washer split

• Extract the mid-surface using geom>surface edit>offset option

• Clear out the errors on the midsurface obtained using quick edit panel

Why do we extract mid-surface?

Mid surface is a surface between two surfaces. If we mesh the entire component in 3d the number of nodes and elements will increase which in turn would increase the storage space and processing power to analyze the component. To avoid this mid-surface is created where we represent the entire 3d model by mid-surface and create shell element.

Meshing

Why do we perform meshing?

The basic idea of finite element analysis is to make calculations at only limited number of points and then interpolate the results for the entire domain. Any continuous object has infinite degrees of freedom and it’s just not possible to solve this problem in this format. Finite Element Method reduces the degrees of freedom from infinite to finite with the help of discretization or meshing.

• Meshing is performed using 2D>automesh

Quality criteria

What is Quality criteria?

These are the parameters or the ranges upto which the ideal geometry or mesh size can be compromised or altered.

• Following Quality criteria needs to be followed:

• There will be many areas which will not follow the quality criteria.

• We will try to fix these areas using following tools:

Swap edge, Smooth, Drag tria elements, Node optimize, Element optimize, Split quad element, Combine tria elements.

• Assign thickness and property card to the component.

• Below is the cleaned meshed model.

Learning Outcome

• Learned to extract mid surface.
• Learned assigning thickness and properties.
• Learned to clean the model using various tools under quality index.

Conclusion

• In this project the manual mid surfacing and meshing on the floor panel geometry of a car was successfully performed.