Learning Forum

[enpi]

Hello,

I have an imported model into workbench with the "external model" module. The model is composed of geometry and mesh and I have it in .ans or .inp formats. I need to split this body into several sub-bodies following the meshing lines in order than to define friction contacts between these sub-bodies. The model will be used in mechanical. Is there a way of doing this?

Thanks for the help.

[mjmiddle]

The "External Model" does not import geometry. It imports mesh and creates a synthesized geometry extracted from the surface mesh. This is really a facetized geometry, which is just surface mesh grouped and treated like geometry. It is not easily editable. Furthermore, once read into Mechanical, there is not a geometry modeler inside Mechanical. Nor does Mechanical have much for mesh editing. It does not have the ability to split the mesh. So you would need to read your mesh into another software to edit it. You can read the surface mesh into SpaceClaim. The volume mesh will be lost. You can use "Tools > Autoskin" or "Tools > skin" to create CAD geometry over the mesh. In the "Facets" ribbon, there is a "Split" tool that allows you to split the surface mesh, typically by a plane, not at a grid line. This is only for surface mesh. Volume mesh will be lost.

ICEM CFD has the ability to edit the mesh, but the method is not straight forward, and would take multiple steps and a bit of creativity to split the mesh at a gridline. You can look to software outside Ansys or go back to your source modeling software where the mesh was originally made.