10/09/2018 5 reasons why you should use a mid-surface shell mesh for thin-walled parts

 +31(0) 418 644 699  info@simuleon.com

    

Simuleon FEA Blog

5 reasons why you should
use a mid-surface shell mesh
for thin-walled parts
Posted by Dolf Broekaart on Sep 6, 2016 9:51:05 AM

Find me on:

Tweet Share

It happens all the time. Too often we still see companies that
trust on simulations being performed with a solid-mesh, while
the geometry is thin walled, like with sheet-metal, extruded parts
or plastic parts. If you ask the people why they didn’t use a shell
mesh, most of the time they will tell you it will take too much time
to generate a mid-surface shell model, or they think it is not
feasible capturing the necessary detail in the analysis, so they
decided to just ignore the rules.

https://info.simuleon.com/blog/5-reasons-why-your-fea-simulations-should-be-setup-with-a-mid-surface-shell-mesh-for-thin-walled-parts 1/10
10/09/2018 5 reasons why you should use a mid-surface shell mesh for thin-walled parts

Below we have listed why creating a mid-surface shell model is

still favourable.

1. Accuracy of the end result can be way off with solid

mesh elements
Whether you have followed a basic course from a CAD-
integrated FEA software, or from a stand-alone High-End
FEA software, they will all teach you to create shell
meshes for thin-walled parts. Even if you setup a simple
thin-walled beam and let it suffer under bending, you
already see differences in both stress and displacement for
a solid mesh versus a mid-surface shell mesh. Particularly
when the solid mesh approach is a course mesh, the
effects are even bigger. When you refine the solid mesh,
the results will become more accurate, but you will need
quite some iterations to have mesh convergence.

2. The solid mesh approach, which needs 3 to 4 elements

across the thickness, results in huge amount of
elements and long running times
If you do decide to take the solid mesh approach, please
be aware that you need a minimum of 3 to 4 elements
across the thickness to capture all bending and stiffness
effects to generate an accurate solution. For products that
don’t look like a simple beam, it can potentially create huge
number of elements, resulting in large running times. If you
think of injection moulded parts with ribs, draft angles and

https://info.simuleon.com/blog/5-reasons-why-your-fea-simulations-should-be-setup-with-a-mid-surface-shell-mesh-for-thin-walled-parts 2/10
10/09/2018 5 reasons why you should use a mid-surface shell mesh for thin-walled parts

fillets and other types of typical geometry, the necessary

amount of elements will be enormously and therefor the
running times will be huge. We have seen differences for
injection moulded parts with a shell approach that take 1
hour to run, while with a proper solid mesh including 3 to 4
elements across the thickness the running time could
potentially be somewhere between 5 to 10 days per
simulation run.

3. Meshing nasty geometry with solid mesh elements

needs preparation too
For a lot of the standard meshing techniques, the solid
mesh needs to be as small as the smallest detailed
geometry in the model. We receive a lot of files from
customers that contain sliver faces, short edges, surfaces
that do not align, etc. Simply pushing the mesh button
won’t do the trick here since the system will most likely tell
you it is unable to mesh. So you need to clean-up the
geometry anyway, which also for a solid part can be quite a
hassle. Sometimes switching to a curvature based mesher
can do a part of the trick, but you can potentially lose the
necessary detail. Since you need to clean up this geometry
anyway, why not define a mid-surface model from the
original model?

4. Post processing of huge amount of solid element

simulations takes ages
It seems to be trivial, but often overlooked. The time that
you will need for running these huge amount of element
simulations, also contributes to the potentially frustrating
post processing of the end results. Ever needed to wait for
more than 30 minute to generate one simple stress plot, or
even a few hours to generate a single animation? Or what
about non-linear simulations with more than 100 time steps
and the results of those? Once you have been in that
situation of generating huge amount of data, you will
hopefully try to prevent that in other projects.

5. The shell mesh approach creates a fast running

accurate simulations
Since the amount of elements is less for the shell
approach, because the wall thickness is captured as a
mathematical value instead of actually modelling the
thickness, there will be less equations to solve. This results
in simulations that run in minutes or an hour instead of

https://info.simuleon.com/blog/5-reasons-why-your-fea-simulations-should-be-setup-with-a-mid-surface-shell-mesh-for-thin-walled-parts 3/10
10/09/2018 5 reasons why you should use a mid-surface shell mesh for thin-walled parts

days to weeks. That also means that a shell mesh

approach can be easily used to perform iterative
simulations. Another benefit is that changing the wall
thickness in your simulations with the shell approach are
easy, and you will see the results of those changes in a
very short time.

Other considerations when

creating mid-surface shell models
Of course the creation of a proper mid-surface mesh model is
not an easy task. It comes with the hurdles of surface trimming,
surface knitting, surface splitting, surface deleting and patching,
etc. You also need to think of where you would like to setup the
model. In the native CAD program, or in your standalone or cad-
integrated simulation software?

Are there any shortcuts when creating a

mid-surface shell model?
It would be great if we could tell you there is an automatic kind
of software doing all this labour intensive work for you with a
push of the button, but unfortunately this is not the case. At the
end it still comes down to lots of clicking and manual labour.

What could be considered is to share some thoughts with the

designers upfront. If they would setup their 3D model from
scratch as a surface model and later thickening those surfaces
to apply the proper wall thickness, the mid-surface model could
be generated in minutes instead of days. But of course this
would influence the modelling behaviour of the designer, and if
this is not really valuable to them, they most likely won’t do this.
Persons who are acting both as a designer and a simulation
engineer will clearly see the benefits of this typical approach.

How to force a compatible mesh for shell

elements?

https://info.simuleon.com/blog/5-reasons-why-your-fea-simulations-should-be-setup-with-a-mid-surface-shell-mesh-for-thin-walled-parts 4/10
10/09/2018 5 reasons why you should use a mid-surface shell mesh for thin-walled parts

When you create a mid-surface shell model, the surfaces that

are intersecting won’t have overlaying nodes automatically. This
will cause parts or ribs that don’t have proper contact conditions
and just don’t contribute to the stiffness of the structure, but just
intersect with the whole model not building up any reaction
forces or stresses. This can be solved by splitting or partitioning
the surfaces on such a way that the intersecting surfaces are
splitted or partitioned on the edge that they share in common.
On this way you will force an automatic compatible mesh where
the nodes are perfectly aligned with each other.

Can all details be captured?

For some detailed geometry it can be quite hard to create a mid-
surface model from. In other cases it is not feasible at all. Even
in those situations, you could consider a submodelling
approach. So inevitably solid meshing the necessary detail, but
using shell surfaces for the surrounding geometry can still do the
trick. Of course you do need to pay attention to coupling those
solid and shell geometries together again.

Creating mid-surface shell geometry in

3DCAD?
Modern type 3DCAD software will come with comprehensive
and powerful surfacing capabilities, which tend to be more
powerful than the capabilities available in stand-alone simulation
software. For most of our mid-surface shell model generation we
use SolidWorks in our company. Of course SIMULIA Abaqus
also has capabilities of creating such, but as you could expect, a
proper 3DCAD program just offers better capabilities to reach
your goal faster. So depending on the complexibility and the
amount of trimming work we decide to use Abaqus or
SolidWorks.

Once the model is finished in SolidWorks, it can be easy read

into Abaqus to start the simulations with.

Can a shell model contain variable wall

thicknesses?
Dedicated standalone FEA software like SIMULIA Abaqus can
apply variable wallthicknesses on a shell mesh. There are many
different specifications that can be used for applying the
necessary thickness differences to you model.

https://info.simuleon.com/blog/5-reasons-why-your-fea-simulations-should-be-setup-with-a-mid-surface-shell-mesh-for-thin-walled-parts 5/10
10/09/2018 5 reasons why you should use a mid-surface shell mesh for thin-walled parts

Do you find it difficult to work with shell meshes and setting up

these geometries?

Talk to one of our FEA specialists

today!

Topics: Abaqus, mid-surface, Shell Model

Arash Nasr
06/09/2016 05:44:37

Thank you Dolf for your very useful article. As you

mentioned the problem is coming from the 3DCAD
design software. As a quick job and for just linear
analysis, good old continuum shall elements could be
used. One thorough thickness would be enough. The
only care would be material direction.

Reply to Arash Nasr

Daniela Neagoe
06/09/2016 06:00:18

Dear Mr Dolf, many thanks to you for your very useful

articles.
All the best, Daniela Neagoe

Reply to Daniela Neagoe

Milan Marinkovic
11/09/2016 10:08:29

Hello Dolf, great article, however Abaqus lacks good

tools to provide mid surface extraction for complicated
shapes, ea. doors with bunch of stiffeners and ribs,
often we need to use Hypermesh to extract mid surface
and once mesh made in Hypermesh than it is easy to
solve there. Long way to go for Abaqus to catch up on
mid surfacing with competition

Reply to Milan Marinkovic

https://info.simuleon.com/blog/5-reasons-why-your-fea-simulations-should-be-setup-with-a-mid-surface-shell-mesh-for-thin-walled-parts 6/10