Follow Along: Creating an FE Mesh

In this lesson, we will create an FE mesh using a car brake pedal. The first step that we’ll do is import a part, so I’ll go to my utilities and choose that Import Part.

For my part, you can download our solid brake pedal example. So I have my CAD body and the first thing that we’re going to do is convert our CAD body into a mesh. So I’ll double click to select the entire body and I’ll make it a variable. So I’ll do a right click, Create CAD Body Variable, and I’ll rename this by double clicking on that title and labeling this part.

To convert this to an FE mesh, I have to do that Mesh From CAD Body which I can find under my conversions in my utilities tab. So that third option, I’ll convert my part to a mesh like so. If we are going to run a simulation on a part like this, we’re also going to want to remesh the surface so we can control that edge length of our mesh. So I can search in my search bar for Remesh Surface and for the surface, I will choose this mesh from CAD body. For our edge length, we can put in a non-uniform edge length which you can learn more about in our Field Driven Design, but I’ll just use the value of 2 mm and for the shape, I want a triangle. So now it’s taken that mesh and it has given it that uniform edge length of 2 mm throughout that surface.

If I do a section cut by typing X, what we can see is that this is only a mesh on the surface. So if we want to create a volume mesh or an FE mesh, we will want to have that mesh going throughout our part. To do this, I will grab from my search bar a Volume Mesh for the domain that will be our remesh surface. So I’ll drag and drop that. Our edge length, I’ll keep the same as a remesh surface of 2 mm, and now we can see that I have my mesh going throughout my part and not just in the surface. So that is our volume mesh.

If I was planning to run a simulation on this part, I have one last step which is our FE Mesh block. So I’ll do our FE Volume Mesh for discretization that will be our volume mesh and we can choose to have linear or quadratic geometric order. So it’ll look pretty much the same but now we will be able to use this for our mesh when running a simulation.