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> The professor who taught my course on FEM said most of the commercial tools had FEM models not much more complex than the ones you'd make in a graduate FEM co

> The professor who taught my course on FEM said most of the commercial tools had FEM models not much more complex than the ones you'd make in a graduate FEM course. I haven't worked in this space for 15 years so this might have changed, but back then no one used CAD tools for serious FEM modeling. The fundamental reason is that the requirements for a good FEM mesh are different from a good geometry mesh. Just one example from my work back then is that we had to follow modeling guidelines which required the use of quads with balanced aspect ratio only. Use of triangles had to be justified. We basically remodeled everything in the FEM software (PATRAN, FEMAP and lots of in-house tools in our case).

globuous 6y ago
Yeah, I did work on exactly that,porting a 2 metro ton hydrogen fuel cell CAD model to Ansys. It was a nightmare. You first have to simplify everything by hand (aka remove all the small details) and then rework the topology when importing in the FEM tool (modelling supports, junctions etc). This is actually a very active area of research (at least 5 years ago when I worked in simulation). There were papers on voxel methods, Fourier analysis (move the model to the frequency domain and filter out small details that are hard to mesh and affect convergence) to automatically réparé CAD models to an FEM environment :) I have no idea how things have advances since, but it looked nowhere near usable in the industry half a decade ago. Actually, maybe a statistical algorithms would be suited to simplify models should one have a proper dataset to train on, because it's very hard to do analytically.