The BODY DEFEATURE Tool

The BODY CLEANUP tool presented in the BODY CLEANUP technical brief is used to remove small faces and edges from the geometry body before meshing. It works directly on the geometry body and all meshing options can be used.

To remove larger features, including protrusions and holes, which are not relevant to the analysis, the BODY DEFEATURE tool can be used to obtain a more effective mesh for analysis. The BODY DEFEATURE tool works on the boundary discrete representation (surface triangular mesh) on a body.

Typically, the features to be removed are given as a list of faces in the input. For example, to remove a cylindrical hole, the two faces of the hole are specified. The user can also specify a minimum length where any surface triangle below the length will be removed, except for faces which are identified to be excluded from modification.

Below, we show three examples of the use of the BODY DEFEATURE tool.

Example 1: Engine block

In the following boundary discrete representation, the holes to be removed are shown in yellow. The figures show the mesh resulting before and after applying Body Defeature.

Example 2: Keyboard

The mesh plot of a keyboard is shown below. The features to be removed are colored yellow -- the arrow keys and the channel surrounding the manufacturer's label.

Example 3: Screw driver

The features to be removed are shown in yellow.