Import line elements from Salome

denissps

Hello guys.

Am I doing something wrong, or it is really impossible to import line elements from salome mesher into Mecway.

For example, salome mesh like this:

After importing it into mecway, surface is imported as expected, but lines don’t, just nodes. Any help will be appreciated.

P.S. Basically, in this file I am trying to link surface mesh to 1d element with help of rigid surface in between. I am exporting mesh as unv file, then I import it to mecway. The imported mesh from Salome is attached, as you can see nodes are not connected, and they should be connected manually.

disla

Hi denissps,

I hope someone knows a workaround and will tell you how to import lines from Salome. I don't know how so I would suggest you don't forget about the possibility of meshing manually.
I have seen many comments on this forum of users struggling and getting mad with Salome, Gmsh, Netgen , without talking about issues when importing stp, step, stl,… (me myself too).
Please, consider evaluating the complexity of your mesh before going to those tools. The mesh sometimes can be made directly and easily "by hand" with just a few steps in MECWAY.

1-Draw a square with four nodes and four lines.
2-Extrude them in your z direction.
3-Build a square element at the end.
4-Draw 2 nodes and build your line .

Refine as much as you need. Your mesh will be structured. It doesn't mean more work that the one you have already done in SALOME.

Sergio

Hi @denissps , I was able to mesh with line elements in Salome and export succefully to Mecway lot of models. All my meshes were only line elements, maybe you can try exporting as two separated meshes (one for beams and the other for solid or shell elements).

Victor

Unfortunately, Mecway intentionally reads only the highest-dimensional elements from UNV files because lower-dimensional ones are usually redundant edges or surfaces and not really part of the mesh for FEA. So that's why Sergio's suggestion of not having shells works.

Maybe it should import them all but put the lower-dimensional elements into different components for easy deleting? Not sure what the best way is.

denissps

Thank you for your advice @Sergio! It helped, I found an adequate workflow , I think I wouldn’t make it without your advice.


Hello @disla, thank you for reply. Yes, Mecway is great, but sometimes I need to model something complex (like steel structure), and perfectly it should be parametric… Salome is simply the right tool for this kind of tasks. And I was searching for a way of connecting 1d beam elements with surface meshes, and it seems to work fine now!

Sergio

If I remember well, when we create lower order sub meshes in Salome to adjust/force the mesh to some pattern, number of elements or wathever, this submeshes are keeped in the main meshes, in some cases I had to delete manually those kind of element of the meshes for using it (don´t remember for wich solver) before exporting, and is an extra step in Salome before exporting... so the actual behavieur in Mecway is very nice, guess that is more the cases that we create submeshes than we need different types of elements in the same mesh.

Sergio

Nice model @denissps, could you share a picture of the stress also? Was CCX or internal solver?

denissps

@Sergio, It was internal solver, CCX is lacking beam elements, just square and round pipes, if I am right. The stress should be viewed separately for beams and surface meshes, also mecway model is attached to this message. Actually it is very convenient to be able to mix surface/solid meshes with 1d beam elements. The structure can be modeled with beam elements, and just areas of interest with surface/solid elements. When I will have some free time, I will do benchmarking of this technique, will share the results in this discussion.