Sometimes you have a mesh in Abaqus, and you don’t have the corresponding geometry. Abaqus offers tools to create geometry based on a mesh. Here I will discuss two options: using the mesh-to-geometry plug-in and using the built-in tools. I’ll explain the difference and when to choose which option.

Geometry import and meshing is one of the key areas where we as FE analysts can spend a lot of time and effort. For meshing in particular, using hexahedral elements to mesh complex parts can be difficult. In this blog we explore one way to obtain a hexahedral mesh for two relatively difficult parts.

In this blog we will focus on a problem that happens when working with input files. Not exclusively but it is often encountered when performing geostatic finite element analysis (FEA). Briefly, the problem is that the analysts work with finite element models where no geometry is available but only a mesh. Working without geometry brings an important limitation: re-meshing and therefore local refinement is not possible.

But why would we need re-meshing in the first place?

Meshes next to a fault might be fine enough to capture the necessary detail. However, meshes away from the region of interest do not need to have the same level of refinement. If our domain extends through a couple of kilometres we would have extremely large meshes.