greySquirrel
Aerospace
- Mar 27, 2008
- 1
Hi all. New to the forum and though I did my best to search existing threads I didn't find any information that I thought would solve my problem. Any help would be appreciated.
I'm modeling a conical section of a composite sandwich structure and having difficulty determining (or editing for that matter) the element orientation of the solid elements that I'm using to represent the aluminum core.
What I'm trying to accomplish/determine:
1. Is it possible to reverse the normal direction of a large number of solid elements (similar to the way it's done for plate elements) without re-ordering the nodes for each element? During the auto hexmesh command, half of the solid core elements were created with a normal direction opposite the other half.
2. How do you determine the solid element orientation off of the Right Hand Rule or Normal vector that points to the first node along the first face? It's a little unclear from the documentation whether the Z axis points into or out of the element.
3. Is there a way to align the material orientation with the element orientation? There's an "Align to Element" option in the Define Property dialogue box that looks promising but Femap doesn't seem to want to display the vectors to confirm. Currently the property is aligned to a single coordinate system which yield worsening results for elements further away as they rotate more and more from the primary axis.
Kind of a novel and I'm not sure I've given all the relevant information but I'm happy to answer any follow up questions. I'm just stuck and I'd rather not create 108 different coordinate systems.
I'm modeling a conical section of a composite sandwich structure and having difficulty determining (or editing for that matter) the element orientation of the solid elements that I'm using to represent the aluminum core.
What I'm trying to accomplish/determine:
1. Is it possible to reverse the normal direction of a large number of solid elements (similar to the way it's done for plate elements) without re-ordering the nodes for each element? During the auto hexmesh command, half of the solid core elements were created with a normal direction opposite the other half.
2. How do you determine the solid element orientation off of the Right Hand Rule or Normal vector that points to the first node along the first face? It's a little unclear from the documentation whether the Z axis points into or out of the element.
3. Is there a way to align the material orientation with the element orientation? There's an "Align to Element" option in the Define Property dialogue box that looks promising but Femap doesn't seem to want to display the vectors to confirm. Currently the property is aligned to a single coordinate system which yield worsening results for elements further away as they rotate more and more from the primary axis.
Kind of a novel and I'm not sure I've given all the relevant information but I'm happy to answer any follow up questions. I'm just stuck and I'd rather not create 108 different coordinate systems.
