I am a relatively new user of FreeCAD. What I want to do is the following:
- Make an assembly consisting of different parts
- make a FEM analysis of the resulting assembly (shape) where the default interface between different parts is bonded (meshed together, not contact)
- Part Design: to design the parts in different files
- a2plus: to make an assembly from the different parts
- Part: to fuse the parts imported using the a2plus workbench
- FEM: to mesh the fused shape (using Gmsh) and perform the FEM analysis
The fact that for small assemblies, the meshing works correctly makes me believe that what I want to do is possible, but a small bug or incompatibility prevents it from working on large assemblies. Could the problem be that the tolerance of the solver for the constraints in the a2plus workbench is too large so that the resulting shape is not joined but a small gap is present that prevents a good mesh? The fact that small assemblies sometimes work and larger never could be explained by this as for the larger assemblies the chance of such a small gap being present is larger.
My questions are the following:
- Does anyone else have experience with the a2plus workbench combined with the FEM workbench?
- Is the methodology I am using the correct one or are there other ways to accomplish about the same?
Thank you in advance,
Matthias
OS: Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS
Word size of OS: 64-bit
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.18.1.
Build type: Release
Python version: 2.7.12
Qt version: 4.8.7
Coin version: 4.0.0a
OCC version: 7.3.0
Locale: English/UnitedKingdom (en_GB)
Gmsh: 4.4.0