Apologies if this question has been asked previous...
Is there a way to define the thickness of a shell element using a formula/equation? I have a hollow tube which changes thickness with length. Rather than create separate section for thicknesses, I'd like to simplify the change using an equation.
Simulation Mechanical cannot handle this kind of problem. You have to use brick element or Tet element.
-Shoubing
If you are performing a linear stress analysis, you can make the tube in CAD, import it to Simulation Mechanical, and perform a midplane mesh. Each element will have a different thickness based on the thickness of the model. (Use the Results environment to confirm that the thickness is correct.) I do not remember is other analysis types (nonlinear, thermal) have this capability or not.
Otherwise, do you have any programming skills? Or linking multiple spreadsheets together? I think it is possible to specify the plate thickness for every individual element. (If I remember correctly, nonlinear has the ability to specify the thickness at each node of each element.) The general process would be as follows:
The drawbacks of this method are:
If you want to persue this, I can provide some more details.