Entities: Brick Elements

Description

Brick elements are three dimensional elements that can be used to represent 3D continua. They are available in a range of shapes including tetrahedra, pyramids, wedges and hexahedra.

Degrees of Freedom

For elasticity problems, the brick elements require three translational degrees of freedom at each node but no rotational degrees of freedom. Nodal rotations are not required to define the strains in 3D elasticity; rotation is accommodated by relative translations.

Negative Jacobian

Irrespective of the global node numbering system, the local node numbers of a brick element always form a right hand system in the natural coordinate axes (see Brick Elements: Element Types). Bricks that are collapsed, or become excessively distorted during the solution may generate a Negative Jacobian warning in the solver. A negative Jacobian usually means that there is something wrong with the element; the solution should be terminated and the element corrected.

See Also

• Entities
• Global: Brick Properties
• Entity Display Settings: Brick Display