u/Marodorg

Hello. I'm learning FEA (static structural) in Ansys Mechanical.

I'm trying to model a pipe expansion loop buried in soil. The pipe is a shell element, and the soil is a volume element ("sandbox"). Soil plasticity is Mohr-Coulomb.

Boundary conditions:

• Sandbox bottom: fixed
• Other sides (except top): frictionless support
• Right side: symmetry region

Loading: I apply displacement to the left pipe end and assess von-Mises stress at the pipe bends.

Problem: How do I create an efficient mesh for the curved cut-out parts of the sandbox? Is it sweepable?

My current attempts aren't efficient:

• Tetrahedral mesh: 169k elements
• Multizone: 62k elements, but looks chaotic
• I can't mesh half of the model (Multizone fails)

Meshing the pipe itself is fine.

Question: What would be your approach to mesh this? MultiZone? Should I slice the sandbox?

Thanks in advance.