Pardubice

September 2020

MAGMATIP 53
"MESH DUMMY"
This MAGMATIP shows you how to locally influence the mesh by making use of so-called
"mesh dummies".

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ 1
2 PROCEDURE ................................................................................................................ 2
3 EXAMPLE ...................................................................................................................... 3
3.1 Create a Mesh Dummy............................................................................................................ 5
3.2 Enmesh a Mesh Dummy ......................................................................................................... 6
4 CONTACT ...................................................................................................................... 8
1 INTRODUCTION
As a rule, mesh generation always takes place according to the principle "as coarse as
possible, as fine as necessary". For this purpose, you can enmesh different materials with
varying degrees of fineness and using different meshing methods. However, there are also
projects where it can be helpful to locally influence the mesh even more individually, for
example if a certain area in a casting has considerably smaller wall thicknesses than the rest
of the casting. To obtain a sufficiently fine mesh for this area, you would have to create a fine
mesh for the complete casting. As a result, your mesh would be finer than required
throughout the entire casting, which would also result in longer simulation times. At the same
time, the required main memory increases as well, which (depending on the hardware) may
even make it impossible to run a simulation for the project.

To solve such problems, you can use so-called "mesh dummies". A mesh dummy is a
volume that you can create in the Geometry Perspective. With this geometry, you virtually
mark the area where you intend to systematically assign different mesh parameters in the
Mesh Perspective.

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2 PROCEDURE
Step 1:

In the Geometry Perspective, create a volume in which you intend to assign additional mesh
parameters. Of course, you may also import a volume for this purpose. It is important that
this volume is given its own material ID, as otherwise, it will not be possible to assign
individual parameters to this area. You can, of course, also create several volumes (areas).
You then need to give an own material ID to each area that is to be assigned individual mesh
parameters.

Tip: Use the opportunity to assign names to these material IDs. Such a name could be, for
example, "Dummy-Z-3mm". Later, you can thus see that this material serves to generate a
mesh in z-direction with an element size of 3 mm.

Step 2:

As the mesh dummies are only used for influencing the mesh, you should make sure to place
them at the top of the geometry tree (move them to the top with drag and drop). This ensures
that the mesh dummies are overlaid by all other volumes of your assembly group. Thus the
overlay principle makes sure that no cells of the "mesh dummy" material type appear in the
mesh and that this material does not take part in the simulation.

Step 3:

Now create your desired parameter sets ('Parameter Sets') in the Mesh Perspective. You will
usually place the additional mesh dummies at the bottom of the 'Parameter Sets' list. By
being the last item in the list, the mesh dummies have the highest priority for the mesh
generation.

Note: For each "mesh dummy" material, you should receive a warning message after mesh
generation that this material is not active in the mesh. These warning messages have no
effect on your further work, but are an easy way for you to control if you have defined the
mesh dummies correctly. On the one hand, the mesh dummies should influence the mesh;
on the other hand, they should not be present in the mesh.

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3 EXAMPLE
Based on the casting shown below, you will now see an example of how to create a mesh
dummy. Please keep in mind that this example is very simple – in this case, you could
certainly create a good mesh without any mesh dummy. The point here is to illustrate the
procedure. Whether the additional effort for defining mesh dummies pays off, always
depends on both model and goal of the simulation. For a single simulation, a longer
simulation time may not be that decisive. However, if you want to simulate several variants or
a DoE, putting in some additional effort will save you considerable calculation time during
mesh generation.

Figure 1: Casting with both thin and thick walls

In this casting, the wall thickness at the edge strongly differs from the wall thickness of the
internal ridge. Therefore, efficient mesh generation is somewhat difficult here.

If you generate a relatively coarse, equidistant mesh, you will get "only" two layers of mesh
elements in the thin-walled area (see Figure 2). The number of mesh elements in the
complete casting is 54769. In a finer mesh, the thin-walled area is resolved much better in
the mesh; however, the number of mesh elements increases to 604106. This, of course,
prevents a fast and efficient simulation.

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 Figure 2: Example of a coarse and a fine mesh respectively

As an alternative, you can also refine the mesh in one axial direction only (here: the z-axis).
The number of mesh elements then decreases to 120968 elements (see Figure 3). Then not
only the thin ridge but also the massive areas have a finer mesh. Using a mesh dummy
allows you to locally create a finer mesh just in the region of the ridge.

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 Figure 3: Mesh with finer elements in z-direction only

3.1 Create a Mesh Dummy

Often, it makes sense to use a simple cube as a mesh dummy volume. Make sure to pay
attention to the dimensions and position of the cube. In our example, the length of the cube
in z-direction exactly matches the thickness of the ridge and the cube is positioned exactly in
the plane of the ridge (see Figure 4). It is important that the cube lies in the correct plane.
However, it is irrelevant where in this plane the cube is created. In this case, we have
created the cube in the center of one of the holes by using a local coordinate system (LCS).
As we do not want to influence the mesh in x and y directions, the edge lengths in these
directions are very small (considerably smaller than a mesh element). This makes sure that
our mesh dummy influences the mesh in z-direction only.

Now, you just need to assign a material not used yet to the cube (here: 'SandMold/Dummy').
Finally, the cube is moved to the top of the geometry tree.

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 Figure 4: Mesh dummy in the Geometry Perspective

3.2 Enmesh a Mesh Dummy

In the Mesh Perspective, you can now create another parameter set for the mesh dummy
only. As in most cases, such mesh dummies have a very high priority, you should make sure
to always create this parameter set (sets) at the bottom of the list. As we want to use the
mesh dummy to achieve a very precise control of the mesh, the 'Equidistant' meshing
method is usually a good choice. Given that, in this example, we want to influence the mesh
in z-direction only, only the input for this direction is relevant. For the other two directions,
make sure to choose relatively large values that are greater than the edge length of the mesh
dummy cube.

We thus obtain a mesh that is equidistant and relatively coarse throughout the entire casting.
Only in the ridge area the mesh is finer in z-direction (see Figure 5). This has allowed us to
further reduce the number of mesh elements from approx. 128000 to approx. 82000
elements.

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 Figure 5: Partly refined mesh obtained by using a mesh dummy

In this example, the mesh dummy was used for reducing the number of mesh elements;
however, it is also possible to adopt this method to systematically improve the mesh
representation of critical areas in the simulation model.

Example: Particularly in high pressure die casting, the gate is often very thin and cannot be
correctly represented in the mesh with one of the materials available. However, it is
especially in this area where the fluid flow behavior and, thus, the filling are substantially
influenced. The quality of the mesh also influences the effect of the intensification pressure
and, thus, of the prediction of solidification porosity. Therefore, such areas should always be
resolved as well as possible in the mesh. Here, too, a mesh dummy can provide quick help
to optimally match the mesh to the geometry.

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4 CONTACT
If you have any questions, please contact us.

MAGMA Gießereitechnologie GmbH MAGMA Engineering (Suzhou) Co., Ltd.

Kackertstr. 16-18 Room 1515 CIQ Tower
52072 Aachen, Germany No. 98 Suhui Road, Suzhou Industrial Park
Phone: +49 241 889010 Jiangsu Province, 215021 China
Fax: +49 241 88901119 Phone: +86 512 62725820
info@magmasoft.de Fax: +86 512 62725825
www.magmasoft.de info@magmasoft-china.com
www.magmasoft.com www.magmasoft-china.com

MAGMA Engineering Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd. MAGMA Engineering Korea Co., Ltd.
25 International Business Park Suite 902, Hyundai 41 Tower
#02-24/25 German Centre 917-9 Mokdong, Yangchun-gu
609916 Singapore Seoul 158-723, Korea
Phone: +65 65643435 Phone: +82 2 21683575
Fax: +65 65640665 Fax: +82 2 21683585
info@magmasoft.com.sg info@magmasoft.co.kr
www.magmasoft.com.sg www.magmasoft.co.kr

MAGMA Foundry Technologies, Inc. MAGMA Engenharia do Brasil Ltda.

10 N. Martingale Road, Suite 425 Alexandre Dumas, 1708, 1st floor
Schaumburg, Illinois 60173, USA 04717-004 São Paulo, SP
Phone: +1 847 9691001 Brazil
Fax: +1 847 9691003 Phone: +55 11 5535 1381
info@magmasoft.com Fax: +55 11 5535 1381
www.magmasoft.com magma@magmasoft.com.br

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MAGMA Gießereitechnologie GmbH

K Vinici 1256, studio 8
53002 Pardubice, Czech Republic
Phone: +42 0773 154664
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www.magmasoft.de
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