How Does a Software calculates Warpage?

One of the quality parameters used for validating mesh in CAE is Warpage. Generally, the acceptable value is 15^◦. I know a lot of you guys find it irritating at times when you’re stuck with warpage especially, on a curved surface where most of the Quads are failing for it. The fact that you’re not supposed to use Z-axis to remove warpage makes it all the more difficult. If you noticed, I used the word Quad in the last sentence. As we know, Both Tria and Quad elements are used in 2D meshing, but warpage applies only to Quad. Interested to know why? Read the full article to understand how softwares such as Hypermesh or Ansa calculates Warpage.

Warpage defines the deviation of a quad from being planar. We need 3 points to define a plane. Since quad has 4 points, if the 4th point is not on the plane defined by the first 3 points, then the element is said to be warped. But we need to quantify the warpage of an element to validate it. To quantify it, we define the warpage as “The angle between the normal vectors of the 2 triangular planes formed by the diagonal of the quad element”.

As you can see, Warpage of the quad in Ansa with 4 points A(2243, -59, 564), B(2251, -59, 562), C(2243, -51, 564), D(2251, -51, 562.9) is 8.87^◦. In the next section, you’ll see how to calculate the warpage manually with the co-ordinates of 4 points.

So, That's it folks. You just learned how to calculate the warpage with the co-ordinates of 4 points. Stay tuned for more articles. Please subscribe to the blog for updates.

Good day

Prashanth