Dear Andrew,

Try the student edition of Pro/Engineer. This is a fully featured CAD
system, including Pro/Mechanica, the finite -element module. This has the
capability to extract mid-plane surfaces from the 3D CAD model, in many
cases automatically. This can be exported for use in other pre-processors,
or you can use the in-built solver. It is also able to work with ANSYS
directly.

If you have any more questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

Regards,

Rod Giles
Elite Consulting Ltd.


-----Original Message-----
From: FINITE ELEMENTS and FINITE DIFFERENCE software users
Prof A D Crocombe
Sent: 21 January 2005 15:26
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: extracting tube centre lines or shell mid-planes


I am currently using ANSYS for teaching UG students. I want to show how it
is often better to use shells and beams rather than the full 3D model
transferred from CAD. However I can find no easy way of obtaining (shell)
mid-planes and (tube/beam) centre lines from a 3D CAD model. It seems
rather pointless to generate the shell and bean geometry from scratch if a
full 3D CAD model already exists. The CAD package they use is SolidEdge. If
anyone could give me any steer on this I would be very grateful.
Many thanks
Andrew

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