Simulation
Defeaturing before you mesh, and why solves fail without it
Small fillets and cosmetic holes are what make a simulation mesh impossible to build. Stripping them is a step, not an afterthought.
Aikyora · Jun 24, 2026 · 5 min read
A mesher does not care that a 0.5 mm fillet is cosmetic. It will try to resolve it, produce thousands of elements nobody needs, and either fail or hand you a solve that takes all night for no additional accuracy.
What comes off
Defeaturing removes holes below a threshold, small fillets and faces that carry no load path, leaving an envelope close to the casting blank. The result is not the manufacturing model, and it is not supposed to be.
Keep both bodies
The detailed solid stays the manufacturing truth; the defeatured body is an input to one solve. Treating them as versions of each other is how a simplified geometry ends up on a drawing.
Scripted, so it repeats
Doing this by hand means doing it again for the next revision. Scripted, the same simplification applies to the next model without re-deciding what to strip.