Hi Petr,
Are you planning on doing hand-built models, or will you be working with CAD models? I believe there is a difference, especially with chunky CAD models where most of the elements are inside the volume, and Simulation may be programmed to handle the interior elements more efficiently. In other words, a 1 million (1E6) element brick model created from CAD and a 1E6 element plate element model created by hand may behave differently.
I tried a 1000x1000 hand mesh but gave up. The FEA Editor was too slow on my computer. A 500x500 hand mesh took time to create the mesh, but I was able to work on it in the FEA Editor without any frustration once it was done meshing. (I changed the surface number of the edge lines, assigned surface controlled temperature instead of nodal controlled temperature, etc.) Some things that you may want to try are these:
- hide the loads and constraints whenever possible.
- try setting the Visual Style to mesh only. Perhaps the UI will be more responsive if it does not need to shade the model.
- define the element type after creating the model. The UI should definitely not try to shade the model without knowing the element type. (You may not be able to apply some loads or constraints until the element type is defined, but see what you can do.)
The 500x500 model was more responsive in the Results environment, especially after I hid the loads and constraints ("View > " tab). I was able to rectangle select some nodes (maybe a few hundred), right-click, and Inquire Results. The dialog appeared within 1 second. You can also free some memory by closing the FEA Editor and leaving just the Results environment open. That may help. (Likewise, if you want to open a model to view the results, it is faster to open the results directly by setting the "Type of File" on the Open dialog rather than opening the FEA Model and then switching to the Results environment.)
P.S. I did notice one possible problem with your model. The perimeter of the model was created with 4 single lines, and the 10x10 mesh was overtop of the 4 lines. As a result, there was 1 large element overtop the 10x10 mesh. In the Results environment, use the "Results Options > View > Shrink Elements" to see what I mean.
