Because of the complexity of the forces interacting with the mounting plate, I decided to model up a simplified version of the connecting arm and apply a simple force on that. I then had two bodies which needed to be analyzed in the FEM workbench. After carefully watching several videos and reading many forums, I saw that the best general approach to this problem is to combine the parts together with BooleanFragments and then use a CompondFilter.
I added some small amount of space (0.001") between the two components and checked the geometry of the resulting CompoundFilter. Everything looked good. Here is the output:
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Checked object: CompoundFilter
Shape type: Compound
Vertices: 98
Edges: 151
Wires: 81
Faces: 62
Shells: 2
Solids: 2
CompSolids: 2
Compounds: 1
Shapes: 399
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Area: 43551.87
Volume: 88750.57
Length: 7892.39
Orientation: Forward
Global Placement = Placement
Something else I noticed was a strange asymmetry in the mesh structure for the mounting arm. If I mesh the arm by itself, the mesh is symmetric, which is what I would have assumed would happened.
With Mounting Plate (Asymmetric): Without Mounting Plate (Symmetric): I am very confused about what is going on here and not sure where to go from here. I have included the FCStd file here for reference. I had to clear the FEM mesh data to get the file size down enough for attaching.
Here are my versions:
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OS: macOS 10.16
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.21.30121 (Git)
Build type: Release
Branch: master
Hash: 9c929897ac46f2309e2bf34b7106f49fcb737a1d
Python 3.10.5, Qt 5.15.4, Coin 4.0.0, Vtk 9.1.0, OCC 7.6.2
Locale: C/Default (C)