Midplane meshing Contact

[Anonymous]

I often work with large plate structures with many overlapping parts that are welded or bolted.  Using midplane mesh should be the best way to achieve this to achieve a reasonable run time/accuracy compromise.  With the help of your support staff, we have explored the many ways to achieve this but have found that midplane meshing is too hard to use (see my posts or history with subscription centre).

I found that I have to resort to using 20 node brick elements often only 1 element thick to achieve a reasonable run time/accuracy compromise.

What would be very helpful is to add a way of adding contacts between midplane meshed parts just like between solid elements (i.e. bonded, welded contacts etc).  Hopefully this could be done automatically or manually.

In addition, It would be great if we could add bolts to midplane meshed parts just like solid meshed parts.

Along with this, it would be wonderful to have an easy method of adding welds between midplane meshed parts.

[punisher]

Tim, this is a very well known issue, and a great request. Thanks.

We had to rebuild an entire assy to adapt to all the midplane sheet component flanges.

[Hoser415]

I'm sure this has already been covered as I've heard a lot of discussion on the topic, but I would like to add to this the ability to easily create contact between plate elements from say a mid plane mesh to other parts in the model that have solid meshes.  I do like the layered mesh approach but it would be useful to be able to easily incorporate plate meshed parts with solid meshed parts.