With the solids import add-on to FEMdesigner you can export an IGES file from any solid modeller or CAD software and import it into FEMdesigner. Usually FE software has difficulty creating meshes from drawing files due to drawing errors and inconsistent tolerances but not FEMdesigner. Our specialist software repairs errors and produces a mesh fast in most cases and has been rigorously tested with AutoCAD, Solidworks, Proengineer, Catia among others. If you email us your zipped up iges file, we'll send back pictures of the resulting mesh.
Restraints, constraints and loads are easily applied to the underlying wireframe model by filling in a dialog box and selecting areas on screen using the mouse. Solving the model is then a trivial operation. To solve very large models we have introduced a new fast iterative solver which (unlike other FE vendor's solvers) can run completely in RAM, avoiding all disk access. This greatly speeds up the solution because accessing RAM is several hundred times quicker than accessing the hard disk.
IGES files are used in preference to other more specific CAD formats because they are easy, fast, comprehensive and flexible. You can use any CAD or solids software, not just the expensive types, and STL files can also be imported.
Some examples of meshes from imported solid models are shown. The piston mesh plots (directly below) are shown beside the as-imported wireframe model. All of these models were meshed in less than 30 seconds on a standard 400MHz, 32 MB RAM computer.
