Hi everyone,
I'm trying to model aerodynamic wing components in HyperMesh, which are manufactured as structures consisting of:
- Outer skins made of carbon fiber laminates
- an internal 3D-printed core, with a non-flat geometry (e.g., approximately circular cross-section).
From CAD, I receive a single solid body without any distinction between the composite skins and the core. Here’s the approach I tried so far
- I created a 2D mesh on the external surfaces and assigned a PCOMP property to represent the laminate with the correct ply stack.
- I generated a 3D tetra mesh inside the volume, assigning it a PSOLID property to represent the core material.
However, when running the simulation with OptiStruct, I get an error saying that some solid elements do not have any property assigned. This leads me to think that the 2D and 3D meshes might be overlapping, or that this approach is fundamentally incorrect.
My questions are:
- Is it correct to model the laminate skins using 2D shell elements and the core with 3D solids in the same component? Or is there a better way to avoid mesh overlap or connectivity issues?
- I noticed there's an option in the ply definition to define a "core" within a PCOMP, but in my case, the core has a complex 3D shape, so this doesn't seem appropriate. Is there any recommended way to model such structure with a shaped core?
