In FEA: remove elements which are not really relevant

What are the important and high stressed parts of the construction? At these areas it is necessary to have nice square elements to show accurate results. Therefore after generating the mesh automatically, the stress engineer must (in many cases) adjust the mesh in these areas.

The import of a CAD model into a FEM package without adjustments, leads to a lot of messy and bad mesh elements. In many cases the mesh requires to be adjusted at locations of interest.

The above figure shows a cross section of a box structure. The lower right side of the figure shows an enlargement of the upper right corner. The enlargement shows the modelled plate elements.

Because of welding facilitation some plates are extended beyond the weld intersection. Meshing this model leads to very small (and probably elongated) elements. Such elements don't contribute to a “healthy” FE model. They probably lead to warning messages telling that the width over length ratio is outside the required tolerances for reliable results. To prevent this it is better to disregard these elements. Delete them or replace them with a beam element (if you are worried about the cross section properties). For post-processing purposes, these elements only lead to a lot of data, which is only disturbing and not interesting.