CAE

Select Femap Elements by Adjacent Faces

30 Dec, 2012 By: Alastair Robertson

Femap Tips and Tricks: Create a group by selecting a number of elements that have adjacent faces.


Editor's Note: This tutorial courtesy of Siemens PLM.

In the absence of any underlying geometry, finite element selection can become challenging. Femap includes many capabilities that can aid element selection, and in this example we'll see how to create a group by selecting a number of elements that have adjacent faces.

When selecting the elements in the Entity Selection dialog, click on the Pick ^ button, select By Faces, and a second Entity Selection dialog will appear.



Here you need to select the general group of elements that includes the subset of elements you want to end up with. In this case, you can Select All and click OK.

In the subsequent Face Selection dialog, select the Adjacent Faces radio button, pick one of the element faces in the model, then click OK.



Back in the first Entity Selection dialog, highlight the selected elements using the Highlight icon button.
 




In this example, all of the elements of the top face have been selected up to a corner in the model. We want to select all of the top surfaces, so we can Cancel out of the operation and repeat the above steps to get back to the Face Selection dialog.

The Face Selection dialog contains an angle tolerance that controls what Femap considers to be the adjacent element plane from element to element. The default is 20.0 degrees, and by increasing this tolerance we allow Femap to include elements around less acute angles in the model. A setting of 80.0 should suffice for this example.



Click OK and highlight the selection once again in the first Entity Selection dialog. Now we see that all of the desired elements have been captured in the selection.



Watch the video of this Femap tip on YouTube.


About the Author: Alastair Robertson

Alastair Robertson

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