MESH

Generating a mesh is the process by which a finite element mesh is calculated from the geometry definition. This mesh will be used for the FEM analysis at a later stage. Conditions (see Conditions ) and materials (see Materials ) assigned to geometric entities will be transferred to the nodes and elements of the new mesh.

What is meshed and how it is meshed is controlled by some default options which can be changed with the commands described later.

The generation does not depend on whether layers are ON or OFF at the moment of generation (see Layers ), but frozen layers are not meshed if the preference NoMeshFrozenLayer is selected (see Preferences -> Meshing). Every node and element will be assigned to the layer in which the original geometrical entity was defined.

The defaults are:

All these default elements use linear interpolations for the unknown variables.