Defining Mesh Operations

In Project Manager, mesh operations are optional mesh refinement settings that provide the solvers with mesh construction guidance. This technique of guiding mesh construction is referred to as "seeding" the mesh. Seeding is performed using the Assign Mesh Operation commands on the respective solver menu.

Shortcut menu, Assign Mesh Operation submenu expanded, On Selection submenu expanded, Length Based option highlighted.

Each mesh operation you define appears in the Project tree.

Project Tree showing mesh operation listed.

Note:

There are no restrictions against assigning multiple mesh operations to the same entities. The type of mesh operation can differ between overlapping assignments. For example, length-based refinement could be assigned inside a body, and skin-depth seeding on one or more of its faces. Additionally, overlapping mesh operations of the same type can have differing, or even redundant, parameter values (such as element length) without causing an error condition.

Typically, the operation that dictates the finest local meshing results will control the outcome in overlapping assignment areas or volumes.

You can instruct the solvers to reduce the maximum size of tetrahedral elements on a surface or within a volume until they are below a certain value (length-based mesh refinement) or you can instruct solvers to refine the surface triangle length of all tetrahedral elements on a surface or volume to within a specified value (skin depth-based mesh refinement). These types of mesh operations are performed on the current mesh, that is, the most recently generated mesh.

In a few circumstances, you may also want to create a mesh operation that modifies a solver's surface approximation settings for one or more faces. Surface approximation settings are only applied to the initial mesh, that is, the mesh that is generated the first time a design variation is solved.

You can also specify Initial Mesh Settings to apply to all objects; however, if you apply separate surface approximation mesh operations to specific objects, the object settings take precedence over the general setting.

You can also choose to override automatic choice of which mesher a product uses, by using the [solverName] > Mesh > Initial Mesh Settings command.

See the technical notes for more details about Ansys Electronics Desktop's application of mesh operations.

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