Week 5 Challenge : Surface wrap on Automotive Assembly

Week 5 - Surface Wrap on an Automotive Assembly

Geometry Clean-up

1. Engine:

The entire Assembly consists of three parts mainly engine gearbox and transmission. When the model is loaded it contains a lot of geometric errors like single connected surfaces and triple connected surfaces hence to proceed further it is required to solve these errors.

Before deleting the single connected surfaces the unnecessary parts of the engine like rings which are created by designer for providing fillets are deleted, however the important parts like connecting rods, pistons and few blocks are kept for performing further operations and rest of the parts are isolated and deleted from the geometry.

These unwanted parts serve no purpose in the geometry and hence having the triple connected surfaces on the geometry is not a problem here because we are not moving into the volumetric mesh the entire case is ran for the surface mesh only.

After deleting the unnecessary rings and additional planes or surfaces the entire model is cleaned up and is shown in the below image.

Secondly as the model needs to be watered right the holes are filled by planar surfaces.

In the next stage the similar operations are performed for the transmission geometry and the gearbox geometry.

2. Cleaned geometry for Gearbox:

3. Cleaned geometry for Transmission:

Once that is done in the engine part the other two parts namely transmission and the gearbox are merged to complete the whole assembly.

Furthermore unnecessary property IDS are compressed and wrap is defined for the entire assembly for 4 mm. Here if the mesh length is more than it will not capture the small elements properly while if the mesh element is too small then it might take a lot of time for meshing enter geometry.

Once the surface wrap is ran, the following are the of elements which are not fitted properly on the surface as improvement is provided for them in order to repair the surface mesh.

Total elements = 416790

Off Elements = 923

For improvement the smoothing is provided, for finer surface mesh.

After smoothing;

Total elements = 416790

Off Elements = 20

As seen in the picture the mesh looks fine but it does not capture the curvature of all elements perfectly as of the mesh length provided, however finer mesh size can be deployed to create a more suitable wrap model.