quad or tri ??

[HugoFr]

hello !

does anyone know why it is preferable to use quad and hexa elements instead of tri and tetra ?
and where can I find a mathematical proof of this?

Thank you in advance !
Cheers

 

[Stringmaker]

Hugo,
This subject has been beat to death over in the Finite Element Analysis forum. I know there are atleast several different postings on this. You may want to check those out. Quads and hexs are preferrable due the fact that they provide a model with far fewer DOF's when compared to 10-noded tets or 6-noded tri's while maintaining the same degree of accuracy.
The mathmatics behind each should be laid out in any FEA book or I'm sure you can do a search on the web. Also check your softwares verification manual. The proof is really in the putting however, so i'd encourage you to correlate your results with actual test data whenever possible. This way you can decide for yourself.

-Brian

 

[cbrn]

Hi,

Please note that the choice about which element type is "better" is not always univoque: it depends upon the geometry etc... As Stringmaker says: try and find a good FEA book !

Regards