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 Simplify
• Reduce Bolt Fit Volume
• Reduce Bolt Core
• Reduce Bolt Spider
• Reduce Spring
• Reduce Thin Volumes
• Reduce Thin Volumes with Reinforcement Learning

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
Reduce Thin Volume	reduce volume <id_list> thin auto	Reduces the thin 3D volumes to a connected set of 2D shell surfaces
Reduce Thin Volume RL	reduce volume <id_list> thin RL	Uses machine learning and reinforcement learning to reduce thin 3D volumes to a connected set of 2D shell surfaces. See also Beam and Shell Modeling with the Geometry power Tool

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.