The Mesh Information dialog box displays information relating to the mesh quality. It is displayed by selecting Mesh|View Mesh Information.
At the top, the Mesh Information dialog box displays the bandwidth, the number of nodes and the number of elements. Smaller values of all these properties result in less memory usage by SUTRA and faster run times. There are also three tabs: Element Angles, Aspect Ratios, and Elements per Node.
On the Element Angles tab, there is a histogram of the angles of the corners of all the elements as displayed on the top view of the model along with a table containing a sorted list of the angles along with the element numbers. Ideally, all the angle numbers should be close to 90 degrees. If any of the elements have angles greater than or equal to 180 degrees, these elements will be listed in a separate table labeled Invalid Elements. The user may wish to edit the mesh to fix such problems or create a new mesh. In either table, if you click on a cell containing an element number, a button labeled Go to will appear in the cell. Clicking that button will cause the top and front views of the model to be centered on that element.
On the Aspect Ratios tab, there is a histogram and sorted table of the aspect ratios of all the elements. The aspect ratio is computed as the ratio between the shortest distance of one of the nodes of the element to one of the sides opposite it to the longest diagonal of the element. For square elements, the aspect ratio will be approximately 0.7071. Very small aspect ratios can make it difficult for SUTRA to calculate a solution. As with the the tables on the Element Angles tab, if you click on a cell in the table containing an element number, a button labeled Go to will appear in the cell. Clicking that button will cause the top and front views of the model to be centered on that element.
On the Elements per Node tab, there is a histogram of the number of elements per node minus the ideal number of elements per node for each node. For interior nodes, the ideal number of elements per node is 4. For nodes on the edge of the mesh, the ideal number of elements per node varies from 1 to 4 depending on the angle of the edge of the mesh at that node. Deviations from the ideal number of elements per node do not cause problems for SUTRA by themselves but they may be associated with element angles or aspect ratios that do cause problems.
