Local Mesh Control Bug?

[mbarnett.bbdf]

Hello, 

I have a fairly large model consisted of an "I" beam welded to a HSS section. I am examining the stresses in the welds.

I am not new to FEA. The Local Mesh Control feature sets the mesh size to a large value (~1") when the slider is set to "Fine". It will only let me type in a value down to .15". This is not small enough for me in the area I am investigating.

I have modelled the component as a single body to avoid using contact sets. I have added gaps where I do not want the stress energy traveling through.  

I should be able to set the local mesh control as fine as I want along an edge, or on a face. 

Also, when I select the edge I want to add mesh control to, it shows the green seed points all over my component. Not just on the edge I selected. 

I had to turn the global mesh size down to .2" to get decent results even using the automatic mesh refinement tool. This is kind of ridiculous. Inventor, Solidworks, MSC, all allow very fine local mesh controls even with large global sizes. I would prefer to mesh my beams large to save computation time (since fusion doesn't support 2D surface meshes) and have the mesh converge to the local mesh control. 

A mesh control of .15" is not helpful when the global size is .2".... It seems the minimum local mesh size is tied to the size of the model.

Thank you for assistance.  

[KubliJ]

Hi @mbarnett.bbdf 

You are correct. The local mesh refinement is limited to a minimum size of 1e-6 of the diagonal of a bounding box around the assembly. Like this:

So imagine there is a box that completely encompasses your model. A diagonal from one corner to the other corner will be the value used to calculate the minimum refinement size.

Thanks,

James

James