For much of engineering product development, it is a CAD-centric world. That's great if you are a CAD driver, but spare a thought for the manufacturing and analysis side. Getting that CAD model into a format that's ready for delivery to a numerically controlled machining program or a finite element analysis (FEA) solver can be really tough. While technology has evolved tremendously over the past 40 years (see "A Brief History of CAD-to-FEA Data Transfer" on page 50), there are still trouble spots. This begs the question: If the current state of the art is mature enough to allow a high level of compatibility between geometry and meshing, why can't we seamlessly integrate CAD with FEA? I have covered adequacy of CAD geometry for FEA in previous DE articles on meshing (January 2013) and idealization (April 2013). We can break down four areas that may be problematic as follows.
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