Can I use super-imposed surfaces for modelling a part of the mesh which is of different thickness?
Yes if the super-imposed surface maps onto a surface which exactly matches it then there shouldn’t be any problem. This is shown in the figure below. The surfaces shown on the right can be superimposed on the geometry shown on the left becuase there is an exact match. Whereas in the case of the geometries shown below the surfaces shown on the right cannot be super-imposed on the surfaces shown in the left. Because ther are no common points/lines/surfaces. However there is no need to resort to the use of super-imposed surfaces just to specify a different thickness. PATRAN allows for different regions of the mesh to be assigned different thickness. It is sufficient to divide the region to be assigned a different thickness into separate surfaces. For example the inner annulus consists of 4 surfaces. These are separate from the rest of the geometry. The inner annulus (consisiting of 4 surfaces) can be assigned a different thickness from the one to the rest of the geometry. This eliminates
