This article is about 3D mesh automation and tries to answer the question of saving and reusing a meshing methodology.

For that purpose, HyperMesh's Mesh Controls are a great solution.

For instance, you have two designs of an assembly and would like to use the same meshing methodology on both, without having to do it twice.

The workflow could be the following:

On assembly 1:

1. Create 2D mesh controls and execute
2. Create 3D mesh controls and execute
3. Save meshing methodology in a template

[Optionally, compare the two designs]

On assembly 2:

1. Load the previously saved Mesh Control Template
2. Assign mesh controls to the right entities
3. And execute 2D and 3D mesh

The following videos illustrate those three steps.

NB: Obviously meshing methodology is use case dependent and therefore should be adapted. Anyway, the video tries to cover several configurations: surface mesh, batchmesh, tetramesh and hexamesh.

-------- STEP 1 - Create the meshing methodology on assembly 1 --------

-------- STEP 2 (optional)- Compare the two designs --------

-------- STEP 3 - Reuse the meshing methodology on assembly 2 --------

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Additional information about HyperMesh’s Mesh Controls

You can define one model mesh control, as well as an unlimited number of local mesh controls. Local mesh controls define mesh settings for specific areas of a model, and take precedence over model mesh controls. Of course, local mesh controls are not mandatory.

The meshing is supported for BatchMesher, surface meshing, feature based mesh control, adaptive wrap meshing and volume meshing.

Eventually, mesh controls are stored in the HyperMesh database and/or can also be saved to an external .xml template file for re-use in other models.

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Fully automated process?

One “limitation” of this workflow is the manual assignment of mesh controls on step 2. To reuse a template, user must first re-assign the mesh controls to the right entities.

If a fully automated process is needed, SimLab offers this solution. Like HyperMesh, meshing specification can be saved in an external file. But this time, the user can choose to export mesh controls with references to geometry ids, face color or group name. This way, when the template is imported back into SimLab, mesh controls are created and automatically assigned based on id/color/name.

Simlab’s workflow highlighted below.