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Exporting Cleaned Up Geometry & Element Clean Up Question

Hello,
Have kinda of an unusual question here.

I have imported a pretty complex surface model in to Hypermesh. I have cleaned up the surface by suppressing various shared edges among other operations. The intent is to do a CFD volume mesh using a different software. But cleaning up geometry is very tedious (so I have been told) and hence exploring the possibility of cleaning geometry up in Hypermesh and exporting just the Geometry part.

Issue is that when I export the cleaned up geometry in to IGES/STEP/Parasolid formats and when they are subsequently opened in a CAD package or different software, a lot of the surfaces are missing. To me seems like the suppressed edges have disappeared or something like that. I think I have tried selecting all entities during export and still get the same result. Anybody has experience exporting cleaned up geometry and reopening it successfully with everything intact in a different software?

Second question is that except smoothing, is there any bulk element quality clean up tool in Hypermesh? For the above, model, did a surface mesh with around 1.2 million elements. Have around 2000 or so elements failing and it gets tedious to node/element optimize each one individually.

Tried smoothing operations, but HM was taking too long (waited 1 hr plus)...
Thx...

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Altair Forum User

Hi Burner2k,

Did you try Quality index panel for element quality clean up?

thank you

Burner2k

^^Hi,

Yes. I am aware of Quality Index Panel. IIRC, thats where one would find 'smooth' option.

Was asking if HM contains any other feature to do bulk clean up of elements other than smooth. Like I mentioned, the last time I used smooth on entire set of elements, it was busy running for longer than a hour (probably because I had million + elements & HM was running its algos on trying various node movements combinations to see which one yielded optimum quality parameters) and I had to kill the application manually.

Altair Forum User

Hello,
Have kinda of an unusual question here.

I have imported a pretty complex surface model in to Hypermesh. I have cleaned up the surface by suppressing various shared edges among other operations. The intent is to do a CFD volume mesh using a different software. But cleaning up geometry is very tedious (so I have been told) and hence exploring the possibility of cleaning geometry up in Hypermesh and exporting just the Geometry part.

Issue is that when I export the cleaned up geometry in to IGES/STEP/Parasolid formats and when they are subsequently opened in a CAD package or different software, a lot of the surfaces are missing. To me seems like the suppressed edges have disappeared or something like that. I think I have tried selecting all entities during export and still get the same result. Anybody has experience exporting cleaned up geometry and reopening it successfully with everything intact in a different software?

Hi,

Can you share the parent file with suppressed edges (.hm file)?

Also, please let us know which CAD tool are you using to import the geometry after exporting from HM,

Have you tried with QI optimized meshing where you provide the element criteria?

Burner2k

Hi,

Sorry the file is proprietary. However, I will try to create another geometry with similar edges which needs to be suppressed and export the same. Used both Catia V5 R20 & Solidworks 2013 to open exported file and result is same in both programs.

Can't use QI meshing since I would need fine mesh near curvatures and hence using Surface Deviation option. The model is big & complex to break it down in to individual sections where fine mesh is needed.

Thanks for replying Prakash. I guess we can take this forward once I create another geometry.

Altair Forum User

Thanks for replying Prakash. I guess we can take this forward once I create another geometry.

Yeah sure,

If QI is not an option, please try Auto cleanup in Geom page with certain criteria (This may distort the mesh, use with caution) or Quality Index as @Premanand Suryavanshi suggested.

Altair Forum User

Hi Burner2k,

You can try Element Cleanup option in the 2d panel. This is similar to QI but has some extra features. Define the QI criteria and parameters. Activate the options below by Remesh option as shown below and click cleanup. This will consider the criteria and parameters you defined and remesh the model accordingly.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

For more detailed information about this panel, please go through Help section.

Thank you

Burner2k

Thanks Prakash Pagadala and Premanand for the replies.

I found the option of element clean up in the 2D element panel. Quite helpful feature.