Remarks on Meshing Walls
It is well known that a regular (ideal) mesh for walls produces better analysis results. By saying "regular" , it is meant to generate a mesh with rectangular or square elements for walls. Analysis results are still valid even if an ideal mesh is not used in analysis. However, the user is advised to check member results to make sure that the results are not over-conservative.
Moreover, the user should always avoid generating a distorted mesh for a wall. For instance, Figure (a) below shows a four-story building with several wall segments (1-16), including an opening spanning over several segments. The wall segment 6 is a complete opening whereas the wall segments 5, 7, 9, 10 and 11 share the same opening partially. (b) shows a coarse mesh for the model. Note that there are a few meshed elements on the side of the opening, which are very distorted. A finer mesh is usually recommended to correct distorted elements, which is shown in the figure (c) below.
Meshing of a four story building: (a) Original model, (b) coarse mesh containing distorted elements, (c) fine mesh, distorted elements corrected
Usually, the user does not need to create a very fine mesh for walls as shown in figure (c) above. For instance, the above model can be modeled in a different manner by reducing the number of wall segments. This is illustrated in the following figure, where the four story building is modeled with a total wall segment count of four (note that wall segment 1 in (a) is modeled with 4 segments as shown in (a)). The mesh generated for this case is given in (b). Even though the meshes shown in (c) and (b) are good meshes, the mesh in (b) has computationally less overhead and also produce acceptable results.
