Mesh Manipulation / Node Editing

Use of the platform
1

O Learned Denizens, I humbly prostrate myself before your collective wisdom.

I’m trying to evaluate the structural performance of a steel fabrication that somebody else has designed.

I’ve received a STEP file with a variety of tube elements, all steel.

I can handle the STEP file in FreeCAD without difficulty, and split it down into manageable chunks. I can mesh these tubes on the outer faces using Gmsh. So far, so good.

It’s inevitable, making an assembly of many tubes, that the nodes don’t line up between the different meshes. I want to be able to edit the meshes graphically so that I can either eliminate coincident nodes, or at the very least add something like a NASTRAN RBE2 element to glue together the pieces of mesh I want to joint to each other. There are quite a few tubes in this structure, so even this will be a somewhat lengthy endeavour - but it’s basically unthinkable to go about editing the mesh in a text editor to achieve what I want.

So the question is, can Salome help me with this?

Thanks in advance!

Damian

2

Hi,

you can try this if your CAD file already has intersecting tubes:

  • import the STEP file in SALOME (module SHAPER or GEOM).
  • Then use Fuse to merge all the tubes together. Or Use Partition if you want to keep the faces between the tubes.
  • Then use the module MESH to mesh the intersected shape.
    It should give you a conformal mesh without the need of node editing.

Best regards,

Christophe

3

Just to add, if you want a conformal mesh that it is also separate by “regions”. Before going to the mesh module you can create the different surface groups in geometry or shaper module and then continue with the meshing. This will give you a mesh that is separate in the different regions (the groups you created) and at the same time, conformal.
Best regards