After facing lot of issues using beams and shells, I decide to model my skid with solid hexa elements, took a little of work and coffe, but now I´m very proud of the work done. The model has about 200.000 nodes and 130.00 elements, most of them very well shaped hexas an some wedges in the eyebolt that was the only component meshed automaticly. For almost all the profiles I have meshed carefully the sections in Salome using quads, and then export to Mecway (using the new library feature), where i extrude to the right dimention and after positioned.
Material es a very basic steel, and load was the weight of all component including piping and valves, using 2g to take in count the lifting operations.
It takes less than one minute in a Xeon with 18 cores and 32 GB of ram (and ssd disk), maybe two on an old laptop with i5 and 6gb. In the Xeon I have a good Quadro vídeo card, but even that it cannot show the result plot at maximun resolution setted in Mecway.
Yes, as I said before in the post, was meshed with Salome. Normally I mesh one face of the perfil (or half/quarter in case of having simmetry), then import in a empty Mecway file, do the mirrowing if is needed and apply material and save in the Mecway template folder for being able to re-use as long as I need.
Comments
How did you connect the various beams? Did you use TIE in Calculix?
Out of curiosity why didn't you just use beam elements for the model, and design all the structural members and lugs using design codes?