Hex element V/S Tetrahedron elments
Hex element V/S Tetrahedron elments
3
Faisalkalam (Mechanical)
(OP)
what is the advantage of brick elements ( hex element) over tetrahedron Element. Most of Finite element softwares use automatic meshing to create tetrahedron mesh ( and you can use p or h element also, like SDRC I-DEAS), but creating a Hex element model some time required long modeling time. So why we can't use automatic meshing of tet element for analysis over brick element, if we want to save modeling time.
Is anyone can answer my question.
Is there is any BIG DIFFERENCE between them?
Is anyone can answer my question.
Is there is any BIG DIFFERENCE between them?
RE: Hex element V/S Tetrahedron elments
Roni Plachta
Roni@AnalysisPros.com
AnalysisPros - Finite Element Analysis Services
Product defects and failure analysis. Structural, thermal and flow testing and simulation. Expert witness testimony. Accident investigation and reconstruction. Experience in Aerospace, Appliances, Automotive, Civil, Marine, Medical, Power, Sports, Tooling
RE: Hex element V/S Tetrahedron elments
Certainly it is much easier with today's modeling programs to automesh tets than it is to gain an equivalent mesh of bricks.
There are two things which drove bricks meshing in the past: 1) as Roni pointed out, fewer DOF gives equivalent answers; and 2) the programs which automesh tets were not as robust in the past as they are today.
The incredible advances in computing power over the last decade have largely made item 1 a moot point--many of the more powerful PC's are able to do the same work that only recently required a supercomputer. As such, what was once a 10,000 dof brick model can be made into a 100,000 dof 2nd order tet model, and still be run on a pc or a desktop workstation.
Along with this advance, many preprocessors have made huge strides in tet automeshing, which has now made it equivalently much more efficient (from a human modeling standpoint) to model tets (vs. modeling bricks) than it once was.
Depending on the type of analysis one is doing, there are still benefits to modeling bricks sometimes, instead of tets. However, for general purpose (especially linear, small-displacement), if your computer can handle the dof's, it is generally much less headache and man-time to model tets.
Historically, this wasn't always the case, hence the tradition of bricks.
RE: Hex element V/S Tetrahedron elments
First order tets ultimately will converge to the "correct" solution, but not nearly as quickly as 2nd order tets do. Their convergence is poor enough that many FEA software manufacturers state that they in fact should not be used unless absolutely necessary.
One other issue that I failed to mention before: 1st order fully integrated brick elements also exhibit shear locking, and can give poor results in bending. For this reason, again second order tets generally give superior results (I make this generality while acknowledging that this is not always the case).
A few years back I actually lead an extensive study into this very question, and our ultimate conclusion was that we should use second order tets (at the time, we were using first order brick elements). For general purpose considerations, they were superior.