Reducing Geometry

The reduce options provide automatic defeaturing and simplification solutions for specific classes of geometry. These options are most often used as methods for rapidly modifying geometry representing fasteners and springs to representations that can be readily used in analysis. For example, the CAD representation of a bolt may include threads, fillets, chamfers, cavities and may also overlap surrounding geometry. The reduce option can automatically defeature, webcut and modify surrounding geometry as well as mesh and apply boundary conditions according to a designated recipe. A limited number of reduce recipes are currently supported for bolts, including the following:

Reduce Recipe Command Syntax Description  
Reduce Bolt (Simplify) reduce volume <id_list> Simplify/Defeature bolt geometry only
Reduce Bolt Fit Volume reduce volume <id_list> bolt fit_volume Simplify bolt and fit to surrounding geometry
Reduce Bolt Core reduce volume <id_list> bolt core Simplify bolt and insert surrounding core geometry
Reduce Bolt Spider reduce volume <id_list> bolt spider Remove bolt and replace with spider mesh
Reduce Spring reduce volume <id_list> spring Creates curve(s) following center of spring cross-section

The reduce command is often used in conjunction with the Geometry Power tool and the machine learning classification methods. The classification tool can group volumes according to commonly recognized shapes such as bolt, nut, washer, spring, etc.