Preprocessor of Intake Manifold for Structural Analysis using ANSA

Objective:

• For the Automobile's Intake Manifold part, geometrical cleanup to be done & to rectify the issues faced during meshing. Surface Mesh will be done under given element Quality criteria. After surface meshing volume meshing will be done under provided quality criteria.

Element Quality Criteria:

S.No	Quality Criteria	Value
1	Target/Average length	5
2	Minimum Length	3
3	Maximum Length	7
4	Tetcolapse	0.2

Both Surface & Volume Meshing will be done according to the above-mentioned quality criteria. In quality, criteria wizard the given parameters are entered so that the ANSA could check the mesh generated is under these criteria.

Geometry clean up Processing:

These CAD models were now to be checked against any geometrical errors such us normal orientation, Needle faces, etc. This can be done with the ANSA's checks manager which helps us to find the surface errors on the CAD geometry. In the checks manager, some options can be checked ON / OFF depending on the parameters required to be checked.

In the checks manager by clicking the Execute button ANSA will check for the surface errors on the visible geometry. Using several surface repairing tools provided by the ANSA these errors should be rectified. some errors can be automatically rectified using the AutoFix option in the checks manager.

After fixing the surface geometry the status icon on the checks managers shows a Green Trick Marks which resembles that the Geometry is error-free. The above images show that the part geometry is passed according to the checks manager criteria. In the beginning, the surface orientation set automatically may be in an incorrect direction as shown in the above picture.

So surfaces to be oriented manually oriented as shown in the Above picture.

Mesh Preparation:

Before the meshing process some of the features to be checked manually in order to generate mesh under defined quality criteria.

The length between two nodes needs to be in 5mm with the tolerance range between 3mm to 7mm. In a failed case, we can join the two surfaces which increase the length between two nodes without defeaturing the geometry.

Some of the unnecessary perimeter lines & hot points can be removed which makes the meshing to be done under defined quality criteria. So the parametric lines lesser or greater than the provided tolerance then those lines must be removed or altered without defeaturing the geometry.

In this case, the component is a mold part with non-uniform thickness at all cross-sections. So Volume Based Meshing is preferred.

Removal of Unnecessary perimeters:

Some of the unnecessary perimeter lines & hot points can be removed which makes the meshing to be done under defined quality criteria. Here in this model, the average length of an element is set to 5mm with tolerance the range can be within 3-7mm. So the parametric lines lesser or greater than the provided tolerance then those lines must be removed or altered without defeaturing the geometry.

Before Removing:

After Removing:

1-Meshing Process for Intake Manifold:

Before meshing the length of a single element is provided as 5mm so that all the nodes are rearranged with a distance between 3mm to 7mm.

After meshing some elements in this component fails upon the defined quality criteria. This can be solved with the Mesh Repair Tools available in ANSA to eliminate all the errors. There are a total of 4542 number (26.3%) of elements that had failed under this quality criterion.

The above picture the inner hood model with 80 no's of surface error which contributes only 0.46% of total elements, thus passing the quality criteria. The element parameters for all other parts can be found from the below After Mesh Elements table. The element type is set to Ortho Triangle for Curvature regions and Triangle for normal flat regions.

Image Before Volume Mesh:

The above picture shows only the mesh is done on the outer surface alone. This model can't be used for simulation purposes. So Volume meshing to be done in order to use this model for simulation.

Image After Volume Mesh:

The above picture shows the volume mesh part with no errors according to the defined Quality Criteria. The mesh element type is set to Tetra as categorized under the unstructured mesh.

The above image represents the pre-processed Hood with the solid volume meshing. The Total elements found in the solid volume mesh is 24824 Nos. Elements details can be further reviewed in the below table.

From the property dialog box, we can see that each part has its own respective volume property IDs as type: PSOLID.