New to MecWay

rlajordan

I have used LISA sporadically in the past and now using MW. I find that both LISA and now MW have trouble importing and meshing my STEP files. I used gmsh to mesh and have a couple of questions. It seems that gmsh saves the mesh in mm. When I bring it into MW it asks for the units and in one of the files the length in mm was 2900 mm. If I say the units are inches, the length in MW measures 2900 inches. My question here is, if I the scale this by multiplying by 0.03937 will the results be correct? Question 2: I meshed another model with gmsh and brought it into MW and gmsh output it as tri3 elements which MW doesn’t like. How can I get past the tri3 problem?

Victor

1) Yes, you can scale it like that. It might still appear as 114.173 inches afterwards but you can just change the display units to get back to 2900 mm.

2) Either:

• Use the CCX solver (Analysis settings -> CCX) or
  
• convert to Tri6 (Mesh tools -> Change element shape -> Tri6) or
  
• generate the mesh with 6-node triangles in Gmsh. This is the best way because it will retain the curvature of individual elements.