Hi Mike,
I'll try to answer your questions the best I can.
I am able to test simple assemblies and add components slowly though there is always a limit (13 parts last time) and then the situation occurs.
There is no limit we set on the number of components. It really comes down to the amount of available RAM and processor speed. What sets the "limit" is the mesh size (total number of nodes and elements). This determines the size of the matrices we have to solve as well.
How do I turn on the memory consumption icon at the bottom of the screen so I can see what Inventor thinks? (Lost it when I upgraded to 2010). Also is windows virtual memory related? I have not had any windows errors.
What you're observing is the correct behavior on 64-bit Inventor. Since it is 64-bit, we are a "Large Memory Aware" program with respect to the 64-bit Microsoft operating system. This means that there can be up to Terabytes of available memory (RAM + Virtual). Therefore, the Capacity Meter has limited use, since it will never get into the yellow or red zone (practically speaking) thus its removal. The Capacity Meter still has its use on 32-bit Inventors, since Inventor is limited to 2-3 Gigabytes memory that the O/S can allocate to a particular program.
Lastly, are there any settings for Inventor to tell it how much memory It can use. It should be displayed in Help => About. There is also a tool in the Inventor/bin folder called Memprobe.exe which can monitor the amount of memory committed, used and wasted. Also it will query the amount of virtual memory used (which may be ~100x slower than RAM)
I would like to mention that we have made countless improvements in our R2011 mesher. I suspect there may be some meshing issues that results in your "no mesh or results, no error message" situation with your particular datasets. This is a rare situation that we'd reallly like to reproduce and address as soon as possible.
There may be some problematic geometry that the mesher has trouble handling, such as particular topologies not matching well, non-manifold geometry, etc.
If you're intersted in the processes involved, Volmesh.exe is our meshing engine, and WizStress.exe is our solving engine. You can witness their progress, RAM used and CPU % in Task Manager during various computation types.
There is an order of operations that we must follow in order to solve a simulation. First, we must compute the contacts, since the mesh needs to know this in order to refine and match the meshes at the contact interface geometry (faces, edges, etc.) Next, we have to mesh in order to generate the nodes and elements. Finally, we can solve incorperating the loads and constraints.
You can Solve after defining the boundary conditions, and the contacts and meshing will occur implicitly (automatically). Or, you can mesh and Contacts will be computed implicitly. Therefore, we can first try contacts explicitly, then meshing explicitly, and finally solving. This may help pin down in which operation you are observing the issue.
It would be great if you could upgrade to R2011. If you could send Autodesk the datasets we can check using both R2010 and R2011 release versions. Installing the latest Service Packs may be able to help, but we cannot guarantee that it will for sure with this type of issue.
Hope this helps!
Sincerely, -Hugh (Autodesk)
Hugh Henderson
QA Engineer (Fusion Simulation)
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