Up and Running in Hours with Houdini's Merlin Mesh Enhancement Technology

Algor Around the World: The United Kingdom

J. M. Dixon Associates Ltd. are design and consulting engineers in Merseyside, England. They design pressure vessels, heat exchangers and storage tanks that are used in water, oil, gas and chemical plants.

Recently, Mr. John Trotter, design engineer, began using Houdini's Merlin mesh enhancement technology in the construction of plate/shell models.

As an integral part of Houdini, Merlin is used to enhance the surface mesh prior to creating a solid, 8-node "brick" finite element model with Hexagen. Merlin also provides automatic surface mesh enhancement for plate/shell models, such as Mr. Trotter's.

Before Merlin, Mr. Trotter often spent two or three days meshing the plate/shell models which he creates. As a new user of Merlin, meshing took just minutes.

Up and Running Within Hours

On his first afternoon with the package, Mr. Trotter used Merlin on a torispherical head, which was designed to be used in a chemical plant. He later analyzed this model, shown here, using Algor's linear stress processor.

Mr. Trotter meshed this torispherical head with Merlin, Houdini's unique mesh enhancement technology. The head will be used in a chemical plant.

"I loaded it up at 12:00 noon and away I went," said Mr. Trotter. "My torispherical head with 4 nozzles presented no problems.

"Within two hours I had produced my final mesh. I have been able to enhance the mesh where I needed and reduce the total number of elements by a third."

About Algor

"What I like best about Algor is its ease-of-use," said Mr. Trotter, "Since I design by taking Algor analysis results into account, I find that it is easiest to work in Superdraw II.

"Merlin really is excellent! It is just what I was looking for to make my job easier. It will easily save me two or three days on each model."

Mr. John Trotter of J.M. Dixon Associates Ltd. was up and running with Merlin mesh technology within hours of receiving the software.