Automatically Refine Your Mesh Using H-adaptive Meshing | SOLIDWORKS

A properly refined mesh is critical to achieving an accurate and efficient finite element analysis with a converged solution. A simulation study is considered “converged” when rerunning the study with a finer mesh does not significantly change the stress results in the area of interest.

Using Adaptive Meshing allows SOLIDWORKS to refine the mesh of parts and assemblies automatically until a desired accuracy is achieved. Follow these steps to use H-Adaptive meshing:

1. Run your study with the initial default mesh settings to check the study setup. 
   
   
2. Right-click the name of the study and select “Properties”.
   
   
3. Select “Adaptive“.
   
   
4. Select “h-adaptive” to automatically adjust the size of the 2nd-order mesh elements.
   
   Note: Selecting “p-adaptive” would automatically adjust the polynomial order of the mesh element rather than its size.
   
   
5. Adjust the Target accuracy – This is the accuracy of the strain energy norm in the model. Set at 98%, for example, the looping will stop if the difference in the strain energy norm between two consecutive loops drops below 2%.
   
   
6. Adjust the Accuracy bias – Moving the slider to the left provides more accurate stress results, meaning the mesh will become more highly refined in the local areas with high strain energy errors. For models with stress singularities, move the slider to the right to get overall  accurate results while ignoring high, but localized, strain energy errors.
   
   
7. Set the Maximum no. of loops This sets how many times the mesh will be refined in an attempt to reach the target accuracy. “5” is the maximum setting, but the study can simply be re-run repeatedly until the desired accuracy level is achieved. (Looping will stop prior to the specified number of loops if target accuracy is achieved.)
   
   
8. Selecting “Mesh coarsening” allows the mesh elements to become larger in areas with low stress gradients.
   
   
9. Click “OK” and run the study.