Coupled Thermal-Structural Analysis of the Shippingport Nuclear Reactor Using Adaptive Remeshing in Abaqus/CAE

Mesh construction is a key consideration in the course of building a finite element model. The quality of the analysis results depends on the quality of the mesh; arriving at an acceptable solution requires judicious meshing choices. Specifically, the analyst must consider the type of ele-ments and the density of the mesh, which is often varied throughout the model, with more refinement in critical re-gions. These considerations need to be balanced against the desire to minimize analysis cost in terms of preproc-essing effort, analysis run time, and computer resources.
Beginning with Version 6.6 the adaptive Remeshing fea-tures in Abaqus allow Abaqus/CAE and Abaqus/Standard to work together automatically in an iterative fashion to determine an optimal mesh. The goal of this capability is to obtain a solution that satisfies discretization error indi-cator targets while minimizing the number of elements and, hence, the cost.
To demonstrate the adaptive remeshing technique, this technology brief describes how a sequentially coupled thermal-structural analysis is performed with a model of the Shippingport nuclear reactor.