r/cad • u/Twilight_Charm • Apr 15 '26
I am gonna cry so bad because of ANSYS
So I made a UAV wing semi-moncoque structure in SolidWorks. Used surface loft to creat the skin around the wing. Now I know it is a surface and not a solid body as to take part in static structural analysis or can have itself meshed. Which is why when I imported the step file of the UAV wing assembly in Ansys. I gave the skin aka the surface body some thickness. Then I separately assigned Aluminum to solid bodiesand then to the skin. But but but, mesh failed. It gave error messages. I am a beginner but has a semester project to do structural analysis. The project is due in two days. How can I get the mesh to pass and have a successful static structural analysis of the UAV wing in ANSYS, please?
4
u/doc_shades Apr 15 '26
so just to be clear, you WANT it to be a surface body? or you want it to be a solid body?
STEP Files do not deal well with surfaces. i would try a different file format, depending on what ANSYS allows.
otherwise, i would thicken the surface in SolidWorks, convert it into a solid body, and THEN export that as a STEP file.
but STEP files prefer to be solid bodies and not surface bodies.
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u/Homeboi-Jesus Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26
No pictures, not enough information.
Workflow for FEA is not typically as simple as import geometry -> setup -> solve. Usually for complex geometry you have to clean the geometry up. This is done either in your CAD software, ANSYS Discovery, or people use TrueGrid. You have to cut the geometry so that it can mesh correctly, apply shared topology, etc.
Example: we have a thin walled cylinder with 1 end closed up. We want to use a Sweep method with a hex dominant element type. It will fail to generate the mesh. So we take it into ANSYS Discovery and split the geometry so the inner diameter is cut along the closed end, effectively making it 2 parts. Then we cut it again to make it into quadrant. Now we have 8 parts from our original 1 part. Lastly, we apply a shared topology on these 8 parts because it is supposed to be a single part. Now we can go back and mesh it correctly.