Defeaturing a complicated model

ajay_bangalore_harish

Hi,

I would like to defeature an assembly for FEM analysis - like remove small faces, some small details like holes etc. Could this be done with Onshape? This feature is available in Solidworks but was not able to find on Onshape. Any ideas or feedback would be helpful.

Thanks

owen_sparks

Hi, you could use the delete face tool to remove holes, fillets and unwanted widgets form your model.

brucebartlett

I have done this before by first exporting my assembly as a para-solid then importing into a part studio doing a boolean to join all touching and intersecting parts together, then going crazy with the delete face, move face and replace face. Move face with a offset and drag arrow is handy, also replace face is vey powerful once you the hang of it.

Sometime and I even do  export and then re-import tho clean up the tree when working on part's/assemblies as it doesn't take long to get a couple hundred features.

When doing this it would be handy to have a tool like in SW to scan for edges under a specified length to find all the small faces, could something like this be made with FS?

ilya_baran

Bruce, for your workflow, what is the advantage of re-importing over using derived?
It should not be hard to write an FS feature that can find small edges / faces and call opDeleteFace on them (ignoring failures).

brucebartlett

@ilya_baran ,  reimport is done to purge the tree as it becomes long and complicated and your not really worried about the creation geometry just doing what you need to get the model to mesh.

Yes I think it would be near impossible to create a de feature tool get rid of all the small geometry and I was not expecting to be able to do this in FS I'm just after a way to find the small faces then manually deal with the once found which is more a tool like measure tool than a feature.