Modeling a plastic cup holder using 2-d shell elements in Hypermesh

Objective: To model the given geometry of a plastic cup holder using 2d shell elements in Hypermesh.

Quality criteria:

S.N	Quality Criteria	Value
1	Target Element Length	5
2	Aspect Ratio	3
3	Skewness	45
4	Warping	30
5	Taper	0.5
6	Min. Length	3mm
7	Max. Length	7mm
8	Min angle Quad	45
9	Max angle Quad	135
10	Min angle Tria	30
11	Max angle Tria	110
12	Tria %	15

Procedure:

1. Open the given geometry of the plastic cup holder in Hypermesh.
2. We can see that the imported geometry has solids. Delete the solids and check for geometry errors in the parent CAD. In this case, the geometry of the parent CAD was clean.
3. The thickness of the component was measured to be 1 mm using the distance function under the geometry menu of Hypermesh. The shortcut key for the distance option is F4 in the keyboard.
4. The mid-surface was generated using the auto mid-surface generating tool. The method of extraction was chosen as skin offset, which worked perfectly for this model. The mid-surface generated was also free from any kind of topological errors.
5. Define the quality criteria in Hypermesh by pressing F10 and entering the criteria in the settings.
6. The generated mid-surface has surface fillets measuring less than 3 mm. These fillets will fail for minimum length errors as the minimum length for this model is set as 3mm in the quality criteria. Thus we have to defeature the mid-surface by removing these fillets.
7. Mesh the geometry using mixed elements with 5mm set as element target length.
8. Check the element quality by using the quality criteria tool under the 2d menu. Clear the quality as far as possible and reduce the number of trias as well.
9. To assign a thickness of 1mm, create a property and set the thickness as 1mm. Then assign this property to the mid-surface component. To view the mesh with thickness, enable the 2d detailed representation.

Result:

1. The geometry was meshed using 2-d shell elements in Hypermesh to meet the required quality criteria.
2. The modeling was completed in 3.5 hours.

Find the completed file here