There can be something of a trade-off here between removing features to improve mesh quality and maintaining the features that will actually affect the result. Geometry should be simplified, and mesh controls should be added to achieve a reasonable mesh quality.Īnother important consideration for the mesh is whether it has sufficient detail to provide the actual maximum stress with stress concentrations. Selecting Mesh Details from the context menu of the element in the simulation tree brings up useful information to evaluate mesh quality. Similarly, distorted elements, as measured by the Jacobian, may cause the simulation to fail. Very elongated elements with high aspect ratios over 3 will reduce the accuracy of the simulation. Aspect ratio is one important measure of mesh quality, this means that the triangular faces of elements should be as close to equilateral triangles as possible. The mesh must be of sufficient quality to provide numerically accurate calculations.
The first question to ask is whether the boundary conditions accurately represent the way the part will be loaded. It’s also vital that the boundary conditions and mesh realistically simulate the loading of your part. This article focuses on the way we interpret the calculated stress to determine whether a part will fail.īefore we get into determining whether your part will fail, it’s important remember that this is only one aspect of a good stress analysis. As with any simulation, the results are only as good as the assumptions we make when setting up the model and analyzing the results. SOLIDWORKS simulation provides a wide range of tools to simulate stress in mechanical parts.