It's Your Choice...

On a recent COSMOS Companion Real-World Analysis webcast, I showed a COSMOSWorks user how to speed up a several hour static solution to 26 seconds (!) with some intuitive simplification techniques. The results were the same or even better since automatic adaptive convergence on mesh size was possible due to the more efficient model. Most of the "clean ups" were completed in a few minutes and stored in a separate Configuration. There were some other model adjustments I made that took a while longer (1-2 hours) but that was due in part to my less than stellar SolidWorks modeling skills and in part due to exploration of alternate conceptual ways to handle the transition from one feature to another.  One point I emphasized in this exercise is that all users have a choice. You are well within your rights to demand that COSMOSWorks mesh whatever you throw at it but in many cases, that will entail some frustrating battles with the mesher and local mesh control. I've seen customers fight for hours to get a feature meshed that didn't add any value to the result or enable to them make better design decisions. Suppressing it and moving forward would have taken seconds. While you do have this right, you need to acknowledge that meshing technology is not yet fool-proof and thoughtful simplifications on features that speed up a solution so you can proceed with your engineering work are often a better choice than forcing your software to deal with the completely featured and filleted geometry that adds no value.

I've been traveling to customers quite a bit lately and feel like I've been repeating this pretty regularly.  I certainly don't (and never will) advocate reducing the integrity of your model to satisfy the limitations of your mesher. However, simplifications that empower you to get as-good or better answers in less time such that you can get your project completed more quickly just make sense.

An even better approach... don't add features that won't impact your assessment of design integrity until the base concept has been validated.  It is faster & easier to get the concept right and add detail later than it is to suppress a ton of secondary detail only to learn that the hours you spent filleting were wasted because the design wasn't going to handle the load in the first place.

-- Vince (PS... sorry for the absence...)