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Does Onshape have a method to export tessellated triangular meshes in double precision?
bob_tipton
Member Posts: 4 ✭✭
stl files are the most common standard format for moving data for CFD/FEA model descriptions and they work well - until the algorithm attempts to do curvature analyses on the mesh. At that point, the difference between 4 byte floats and 8 byte doubles results in bad/unstable/degenerate etc. answers which require a lot of extrapolation of what the model was supposed to actually look like.
If text stl files wrote their values to full numeric precision, or there was an stl_d format using binary doubles instead of floats, the problem I'm dealing with would be solved.
Does onshape have an existing export method which produces a triangle mesh file with double precision points?
Comments
I've never use an STL for FEA… Does you analysis tool not accept .STEP files?
I don't use it often for this purpose, but last time I had to, I just scaled the model up by a reliable factor, such as 10 or 100, before exporting the .STL file. I was told it was much better after. The receiving end just scaled it down again in it's own system, and so a bit of extra precision was achieved.