I created a 2D mesh that I am exporting as an exodus file. When passed to the FE solver, I get an error along the lines of “Element <ID #> is not right-handed” for a bunch of elements (possibly all). The advice I have gotten from the developers is to mirror the elements so that the primary node ordering follows the “right-handed rule”. For reference, the elements I am using are QUAD 8 (for 2D), and HEX20 (for 3D, in the future, but not right now).
Could you please share if there’s a way to “mirror” elements so that I can have right-handed elements?
Rather than “mirroring” the elements, I would suggest that you probably need to reverse the element normals. Here is a case where I created two surfaces with opposite normals. If I do draw face all normal I can see the normals flipped on the green surface.
If I run the command, reverse face in surface 1 all the faces in surface 1 get flipped and the node ordering is modified.
I have seen issues like this when doing axisymmetric models. The mesh must be in a specific quadrant and the elements must be oriented in a specific direction relative to the axes.
Flipping the element normals typically works. Is the mesh in the XZ plane with all values greater than Y=0? That is typical for an axisymmetric analysis.
The mesh is in XY, and I have tried placing the mesh entirely in the first quadrant, so all X, Y >0, but it didn’t help. Does the image below (from libMesh) reflect the ordering Cubit follows?
