[irishguy]

Hello, I made this frame for a small tractor as a part file in PRO-Engineer and then saved it as a .igs file (solids check box checked) to be imported into ANSYS Workbench. Upon bringing in the frame I encountered some problematic geometry.
Pictured here:


I was able to successfully mesh it by using the face sizing command and enlarging the element size for the problematic geometry part. (See how that part has larger mesh gaps)
Pictured here:


Upon further inspection, when I hid the right face, it appears to be hollow since the outside face is hidden, but now you can see a gap into the next face? Shouldn't the entire face be hidden since this is supposed to be a solid piece of metal?
Before:


After:



It's looking like every support structure has two faces with a gap in between them when they are supposed to be a solid.

I'm getting some pretty bad results in my opinion and I'm thinking this might be the problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[HMN]

Ufff, i cannot help you, but I know this problem. And it was exactly when exporting from ProEngineer. The parts were defined as volumes, anyway that problem with the inconsistency.

I tried to export it to spaceclaim to try to simplifly the geometry but there was no way.

I hope that somebody know why this happen.

[irishguy]

Ok, thanks. I tried exporting from PRO-E as a surface feature, solid feature, and even wireframe feature. They all returned the same looking structure.

Oh and I got the end structural component to mesh by redrawing some extrusions in PRO-E so that is no longer a problem.

[HMN]

Originally Posted by irishguy

Ok, thanks. I tried exporting from PRO-E as a surface feature, solid feature, and even wireframe feature. They all returned the same looking structure.

Oh and I got the end structural component to mesh by redrawing some extrusions in PRO-E so that is no longer a problem.

Ansys DM doesn't like solid defined as surfaces ord wireframes. You have to activate only "solid" option. But it still doesn't work for me like that.

Curiosly that only happens with complex bodies. If the body is relative simple, that problems doesn't take place, so I finally decided to open the PROE files with SPACECLAIM and "analyse" it (there's an option to see if there's problems). This program detected some incosistencies, that I don't know why PROE lets. With SC I detected and simplified the problematic areas or removed them.

The best comes when you use the option Prepare>Ansys from SC. It sends the geometry to ansys directly and it works without problems.

I know that that's a patch, and the problem should be solved directly in PROE but I didn't find a way yet!