Generate Mesh Failure for Swept Part

[Anonymous]

Hi, I have a fairly simple part that is essentially a pipe with a few bends in it that will ultimately be part of a larger assembly, but this part in particular is having problems. When I go into Nastran In-CAD,  shell the part, and then attempt to generate a mesh, I get a "mesh failed" message maybe 10% of the time, it works just fine about 25% of the time, and 65% of the time Inventor crashes. Inventor Stress Analysis meshes the part just fine every time, so what is going on/ how do I fix this? See attached part file.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi kent,

Shel mesh by default uses quad elements.

I think that the shape and the aspect ratio of the pipe makes the quad mesh fail with the default mesh.

If you use triangular mesh it will succeed.

Or, you can use quad mesh, but then you need to use a smaller mesh size. I was succesful with meshing the part by using a 2 in size.

[Anonymous]

How do I switch to triangular mesh? I tried with a 2in size on the standard shell mesh and it crashed as usual.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Here is the shell idealization:

This is the triangular mesh with default size:

This is the quad mesh with 2 in size:

I'm using Autodesk Nasran in CAD 2018 R1 (which is not the latest update).

[Anonymous]

Thanks Alessandro, switching to triangular mesh solved the problem and I was able to successfully add the pipes back into the full assembly.

[isancheze]

Sir I have found the answer: don't do the pipe with the sweep tool. Do it with the runpipe tool of the environment.