I sincerely apologise if this question is a duplicate. Though it is clearly a question that must have been asked and answered a 1000 times I can't find any reasonable solution.How do I take a simple 2D CAD Drawing (.dwg file) of a 2D boundary and generate a 2D computational mesh suitable for FEM analysis in any of the following file formats:.xml (DOLFIN XML), .ele/.node (Triangle file format), .mesh (Medit generated by TetGen), .msh/.gmsh (Gmsh), .grid (Diffpack tetrahedral), .inp (Abaqus tetrahedral), .e/.exo/.ncdf (Sandia Exodus II), .vrt/.cell (Star-CD)I'm doing this on my own time so it must be free software. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!Derek
Mesh simple 2d CAD boundry drawing
finite element;mesh generation
For your setup the most common strategy is to transfer data from the CAD program to the FEM preprocessor via a neutral file format, e.g. IGES or STEP, which are both supported by Gmsh. Unfortunately I have no direct experience of DraftSight, so please check if it is capable of exporting (saving) models in IGES or STEP format. (Most CAD programs have native support for IGES or STEP, so I would expect that also DraftSight has this capability.)