7. Refine the Mesh

Once you have results from a single finite element run, you should go back through all the steps and refine your mesh by increasing the number of divisions along the length and the height of the beam. This is the only way to judge the accuracy of your model results.

It is common to double the number of elements in each direction and re-run your model. In order to highlight differences through the thickness of the beam, for this problem you will quadruple them along the length. This will give you 4 elements through the thickness of the model and 24 elements in each direction for a total of 96 elements.

The steps to take in constructing this 96 element model are exactly the same as for the 6 element model that you can restart from step1: specify geometry. Then change the number of divisions NDIV specified along each line in step3: Mesh the object. Or you can also simply clear the previous mesh then refining the mesh by following steps below:

PREPROCESSOR -> -Meshing - Clear

      CLEAR -> Areas

            CLEAR AREAS -> Pick all areas.

UTILITY MENU -> Plot - Areas

You have just cleared your previous mesh. Now you can assign new mesh sizes to the line to create a finer mesh by following step3: Mesh the Object.

Results for the 6 and 96 element models are compared in the next section.