Comments

• Sergio

  August 5 edited August 5

  In ANSYS workbench, you model your geometry as a surface? and then in Mechanical you make a shell mesh? If that the case you could model your parts in any standard CAD program as Solidworks, Solidedge, FreeCAD as conected surfaces and then import in Mecway to mesh directly. If you need to get the midsurface from a solid part, then is another story, those programs has also tools to extract it, but is not so automatic, you will need to extend some of them to join it. If you can show some example or similar parts/meshes maybe we could give you a more appropiate answer.
• Sergio

  August 6

  3rd party mesh tools free or inexpensive...probably Mecway is the unique. There is Salome, Gmsh, Netgen, TetGen that are free (even CGX). Gmsh and Netgen are integrated in Mecway and Salome.
  On the comercial (from expensive to very expensive) side you can use any preprocessor that can output the mesh in Abaqus inp format, such as Abaqus CAE, Siemens NX, ANSA, Hypermesh, Femap, Cubit
• msy288

  August 6

  Thanks Sergio! Really appreciate it! I tried to model a geometry using surfaces in SW and import to Mecway for meshing but it didn't go quite well. I guess I will try Salome and model/mesh there then import the unv mesh file back to Mecway to see how it goes.
• Sergio

  August 6

  If you have access to SW, do the modeling there, including the sewing and partitions. Then export as step to Salome or Mecway. If the surfaces are sewed in Mecway you can get good enough meshes.
• polymathic

  September 3

  My favourite stack to achieve what you describe is:
  
  - Midsurface in DesignSpark Mechanical. This is a very cheap, white-labelled ANSYS Spaceclaim, which is an extremely capable direct modeller so you get all the CAD kernel horsepower for a fraction of the cost. Whilst you don't get a midsurface tool in the whitelabelled version, it's about 4 clicks to get the same result using the direct modelling tools. You can also defeature and repair faster and more robustly than NX, CATIA, Solidworks, you name it.
  
  - Export as high-res STL. This gets around all the tangency BREP problems influencing your mesh edges that you get using STEP or IGES, it just gives you a reasonable fidelity initial mesh native out of the CAD tool. Want more fidelity? Set the facet settings smaller.
  
  - Use Coreform Cubit Learn licence (unless you're doing commercial stuff, in which case you need to pay), import the STL, use their excellent quad meshing tools and export as an Abaqus INP format - this seems to be the happiest import to Mecway.
• polymathic

  September 3

  Also, though: What solver are you using?
  
  If Calculix, beware the C3D20 brick limitations.