Week 3-Meshing of Hood Challenge
OBJECTIVE: Geometric clean-up & 2D meshing of inner panel of car hood by mid surfacing the sheet metal component.
CAD Model:
This is the initial model of the inner panel of the hood. However, the panel geometry has unwanted cons & points, which makes the meshing process really tough.
The model present here is sheet metal, hence, we are working here with generating mid surface by using 2D elements. The elements used here can be both quad & tria, as the model has to be used in crash simulation.
Mid surfacing of the model:
Since, this model is a sheet metal (thickness is less than 6mm), we have to generate a mid-surface of the entire model. Due to symmetry of the model, only half symmetry of model has to be mid surfaced & meshed, while the second half of the panel reflected if one of half is meshed.
This latch is defined as a seperate component, so that meshing can be done easily.
However, the geometry of the latch is not clean for generating uniform meshed structure.Hence, cleaning up of latch geometry is very important for obtaining a unifromly structured mesh. The geometry clean up is done manually as shown above.
Element Quality Criteria:
The above shown is the element quality criteria which followed & monitored for failures.
Geometric cleanup of Midsurface:
Initially after midsurface is extracted auto cleanup of the surface was tried. However, the auto cleanup leads to intrduction of unwanted cons & nodal points. Inorder to avoid such complications, the entire mid surface was manually cleaned.
The above geometrical model was cleaned up manually by removing the unwanted cons & points.
Once the geometric cleaning is completed, the next step is to provide 2D mesh to this midsurface.
As this part is geometrically symmetrical, only the elements created in this half model is reflected along the points of junction of the elements, which helped to create the complete meshed model of the product.
This methodology saves a lots of meshing time just by taking advantage of the symmetricity.
Again the latch region is seperately meshed as it doesnt any symmetricity.
This latch is meshed seperately because,there is no symmetricity compared with the other parts of the model
The below is the link to the model meshed.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jvUTUAGUsqgKHLn9I4l2v25PpiPLgUM-/view?usp=drive_link