Sheet metal and mesh

JL82

I tried to do the mesh to sheet metal part (please see the attachment). There was some problem on meshing: divide edge: local h too small. What do it mean?

Sergio

Hi, don't know what exactly means the local h too small, but what can I tell you is that the bending radius and thikness are too small compared with the overall dimention of the part, so for having a good meshing you would need a very small element size in case of using tets. I would try to mesh only one edge of the part (1d elements), in order to control the number of elements in the radius and the flat zones, then extrude this 1d elements to create a 2d mesh. Then you can solve as 2d mesh or extrude again in element normal direction to have a 3D hexa meshing.

Regards

VMH

JL82, remove the bending radius at the two edges and/or tweet your meshing options: element size, min number of elements per curve/edge.  Like Sergio mentioned, you will need very small element size in case of using tets solid elements resulting in a large model/file and longer computation/run time to solve.

If you are still interested in using the automatic meshing in Mecway instead of manually building your mesh as Sergio mentioned above, I would model this geometry as surface model instead of solid model for this type of geometry and mesh with shell elements instead of solid element and do a mesh convergence to make sure the selected mesh density yield reasonable results.