Evaluating defeaturing-induced impact on model analysis

Defeaturing is a popular CAD/CAE simplification technique. However, defeaturing inevitably leads to errors that can hardly be evaluated effectively during a Finite Element (FE) analysis. A novel index to evaluate defeaturing-induced impact on a model’s FE analysis is proposed in this paper based on the reciprocal theorem. This index is ultimately expressed by a boundary integration of local displacements and forces solutions over partial boundaries of the simplified model and the suppressed features. This novel index naturally fits a feature-based design scenario, and facilitates the need of reusing the computation results in downstream tasks. Moreover, its local expression gives our strategy of local computation, and improves computation efficiency. Applications of the evaluation index in guiding model simplification and other applications of engineering analysis are also demonstrated through examples.