Evaluating element quality

Use the Element Quality command to evaluate the quality of the elements in your model based upon:

• General geometric criteria.

• The specific quality criteria required by certain solvers, such as Simcenter Nastran and Abaqus.

• A set of neutral criteria for all other solvers.

General geometry checks

You can use the General Geometry Checks options in the Element Quality dialog box to identify elements in your model that are either overly large or small based on size criteria you specify.

For more information, see General geometry checks for elements.

Solver specific quality checks

You can evaluate the elements in your model using solver-specific criteria in the following solver environments:

• Simcenter Nastran

• MSC Nastran

• Abaqus

• LS-DYNA

• ANSYSNote: The ANSYS solver-specific checks in this software are consistent with the quality checks in the standard ANSYS solver. They are not consistent with the quality checks used by the ANSYS Workbench platform.

• Simcenter Samcef

In these environments, the Element Quality command uses the element quality checks and the default quality threshold values required by the solver. For example:

• in the ANSYS solver environment, you can specify Parallel Deviation value limits for elements both with and without midside nodes.

• in the Simcenter Samcef environment, you can specify Cohesive ratio value limits for cohesive elements.

For more information, see

• Nastran and Multiphysicselement quality checks

• Abaqus element quality checks

• ANSYS element quality checks

• LS-DYNA element quality checks

• Samcef element quality checks (Simcenter Samcef)

Solver neutral quality checks

For all other solvers supported by this software, you can use the Element Quality command to perform some general checks of element quality. These checks are solver neutral and are intended to identify poor quality elements based upon a set of general geometric criteria.

The solvers that use neutral quality checks include:

• Simcenter 3D Thermal/Flow

• Simcenter 3D Electronic Systems Cooling

• Simcenter 3D Space Systems Thermal

• Simcenter 3D Acoustics BEM

For more information, see Solver neutral element quality checks.

Setting warning and error limits

For a given quality check, such as Aspect Ratio, you can specify separate Warning Limit and Error Limit values.

• Use the Warning Limit options to specify quality threshold values at which your solver issues a warning message.

• Use the Error Limit options to specify the threshold value at which your solver issues an error message.

You can also use the Warning Color and Error Color option to specify different colors to use to display elements that violate these limits.

You can also select different element quality criteria and specify different quality threshold values depending on the element’s type. If you select the Use Element Type Specific Values check box, you can then select different quality checks and specify different quality threshold values for different types of elements.

The element type specific values that you can specify depend on your selected solver environment. For example, in the Simcenter Nastran environment, you can specify different Aspect Ratio values for different types of elements, such as tetrahedrons and pyramids.

Output group support

You can use the Output Settings options in the Element Quality Checks dialog box to have the software automatically place certain elements into a new group, named OUTPUT GROUP, in the Simulation Navigator. This group overwrites any existing output group.

You can choose to create a group of:

• Elements that fail any of the specified Warning Limit values.

• Elements that fail any of the specified Error Limit values.

• Elements that fail both the specified Warning Limit and Error Limit values.

Correcting 2D element quality failures

If the Element Quality Check command finds 2D elements that violate certain quality thresholds, you can click the Correct Failed Elements button to use the Correct Element Quality dialog box to try to fix those issues.

Correcting element quality issues

For more information, see Correcting 2D element quality failures.

Where do I find it?

Application	Pre/Post
Prerequisite	A FEM, assembly FEM, or Simulation file as the work part and the displayed part
Command Finder	Element Quality
Menu	Analysis→Finite Element Model Check→Element Quality

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Evaluating element quality, Simcenter 3D 2021.1 Series

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