A formal theory for estimating defeaturing-induced engineering analysis errors

Defeaturing is a popular CAD/CAE simplification technique that suppresses ‘small or irrelevant features’ within a CAD model to speed-up downstream processes such as finite element analysis. Unfortunately, defeaturing inevitably leads to analysis errors that are not easily quantifiable within the current theoretical framework.In this paper, we provide a rigorous theory for swiftly computing such defeaturing-induced engineering analysis errors. In particular, we focus on problems where the features being suppressed are cutouts of arbitrary shape and size within the body. The proposed theory exploits the adjoint formulation of boundary value problems to arrive at strict bounds on defeaturing induced analysis errors. The theory is illustrated through numerical examples.