Mesh Generation

Next the mesh of the geometry to be used in the analysis will be generated using lineal tetrahedral elements.

Size assignment

The size of the elements generated in the mesh step is of critical importance. On the one hand, too big elements can lead to bad quality results, whereas too small elements can dramatically increase the computational time without improving the quality of the result.

In this example the mesh size of the free surface (and the lines and points of this surface) has been set to 0.1 and the hull points, lines and surface to 0.05.

After the size assignment, the mesh is generated selecting the corresponding option (Meshing>Generate) in the menu. The Elements general size has been fixed to 1.0 and the Unstructured size transitions has been set to 0.5.

The resulting mesh of  23157 nodes and 90541 tetrahedra may be too coarse for practical purposes but is more than enough for testing the capabilities of the program.