When creating a solid hexahedral mesh from a shell (surface), it is possible to specify the number of layers to be extruded through the “thicken shell mesh” option. This is a nice and neat feature to create a solid from a simple surface.
It would be great if the “thicken shell mesh” would have an option (or doing it by default) to also create either individual solids or element sets for each layer created. This would then allow to assign different material properties to the different layers or it would allow to create layer to layer interactions as desired.
Example file here:
Hope this makes sense. Many thanks for adding this to the “wish list” and thank you all the same if it would not make it!
when element set has been defined then it can be converted to part and hides, this process repeats for all layers. However, feature to directly generate part for each layer in PrePoMax during extrusion can accelerate the process of modeling.
The iterative process followed is, create: Element Set → Convert to solid → hide solid → repeat…
It works sometimes when creating an element set based on either ‘surface’ or ‘face angle’ selection, but there is always one or two layers somewhere which cannot be separated.
it seems the problem is in solid element share common faces in model files, to eliminate this needed to define shell element with number of layers by composite option. Use check model feature in PrePoMax and save the mesh.
