7. Refine the Mesh


Generally, a finer mesh will give you more accurate results because of its detailed solution. For that reason, you should typically model a problem using multiple meshes having different levels of resolution to ensure your results are sufficiently accurate.

To refine the mesh, you will have to go back through the same steps again, and increasing the number of divisions along the length and the height of the plate on the "Mesh the Object" step.

For this problem, you can double the number of elements in each direction. This will give you 4 elements along the height of the plate, and also 4 elements along the length of the plate. As a result, it will be a total of 16 elements.

The steps to take in constructing this 16 element model are exactly the same as for the 4 element model, except for the number of divisions NDIV specified along each line in step3: Mesh the object.

Results for the 4and 16 element models are compared in the next section.