ABAQUS/CAE provides many different repair tools, and it is often difficult to decide which of the tools to use and in which order to use them. In general, repairing the geometry of an imported part is an art that requires experimentation and experience to master. The best approach depends on the complexity of the part and how much detail you want to remain in the part before you mesh the part and analyze it.
The goals of the repair operations are as follows:
Create a part whose entities are all valid.
Create a part that has the smallest number of edges and faces to avoid impacting the mesh generation. Ideally, the part will have no small edges or faces.
The following guidelines will help you develop an efficient approach to repairing your parts:
Use the geometry diagnostic tools
Use the geometry diagnostic tools to query the part for invalid and imprecise entities, free edges, short edges, small faces, and sharp corner angles.
Use selection groups
You can use mouse button 3 to create temporary selection groups to make the combination of geometry diagnostic tools and repair tools easier to use. You can use the geometry diagnostic tools to highlight a region of invalid and imprecise geometry, and you can copy the region into a selection group. You can then paste the selection group into the Repair toolset when specifying the region to repair.
Use display groups
Use display groups to selectively remove faces and cells to help you see inside complex parts and to determine which entities are highlighted by the geometry diagnostic tools.
Take an incremental approach
Use the repair tools on small groups of selected faces and edges and check that the outcome of the repair process is correct before proceeding.
Keep solids intact
Try not to convert a solid into a shell by removing faces from the solid. To avoid removing faces, use the Replace faces, Repair small edges, and Repair small faces tools.
Avoid creating wires
If your part is a solid or a shell, try not to perform operations that result in wires. It is difficult for ABAQUS/CAE to reconstruct faces from wires.
Remove fillets and chamfers
Use the Replace faces tool and the Extend neighboring faces option to remove fillets and chamfers from your part and extend the neighboring faces to close the resulting gap.
Remove faces that meet tangentially
Use the Replace faces tool or the Repair small faces tool to repair faces that are approximately tangential. You should use the Repair small faces tool to remove faces that are relatively small. The Repair small faces tool simply extends the remaining faces until they meet. The small face is deleted in the process, although the result may be imprecise. Use the Replace faces tool for relatively large faces that meet tangentially. The Replace faces tool uses underlying points to replace the original faces with an approximate surface.
Check the validity of the part
If your part is invalid, you can check if the repair operations have made the part valid by clicking mouse button 3 on the part in the Model Tree and selecting Update validity from the menu that appears. Checking the validity can be a lengthy operation, and you should wait until you have finished repairing the part before you check its validity. If a part is already valid, none of the repair operations will make it invalid.
Create partitions after you repair
If your part contains partitions, the Repair toolset may delete them during a repair operation. To avoid this problem, you should wait to partition the part until after you have finished repairing it.