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Overview

Geometry cleanup is one of the most time-consuming stages of any simulation workflow. CAD models built for manufacturing are dense with features that are irrelevant to simulation — small fillets, logo embossments, thin slivers, fastener detail — and imported geometry from suppliers often arrives with translation artefacts: gaps, duplicate faces, non-manifold edges, and missing surfaces. Argus can carry out geometry cleanup directly inside your simulation pre-processor, working through an inspection-and-repair loop that mirrors what an experienced analyst would do manually — but faster and without the repetitive overhead. Argus is particularly effective in Ansys Discovery and Ansys SpaceClaim, both of which expose a rich set of programmatic geometry operations that the agent can drive precisely and repeatably.

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What Argus is good at

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Rules-based defeaturing

Many cleanup tasks follow a clear rule: “remove all fillets below 2mm”, “suppress all holes smaller than M4”, “delete cosmetic features on exterior faces”. Argus excels at this class of task because the rule can be stated once and applied systematically across the entire model — including assemblies with dozens of bodies — without the analyst touching each feature individually. This is the highest-value use of Argus in cleanup: tasks that are conceptually simple but manually expensive due to repetition.

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Geometry healing

Imported STEP, IGES, and Parasolid files frequently carry translation defects. Argus can run a structured inspection, categorise the issues it finds, and apply targeted fixes:
  • Gap closure — stitch open edges where faces don’t meet within tolerance
  • Missing face repair — reconstruct faces that failed to translate
  • Duplicate geometry removal — collapse coincident faces or bodies that cause solver errors
  • Normal consistency — flip reversed face normals on surface models

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Small face and sliver removal

Short edges, needle-shaped triangular faces, and sliver surfaces cause poor mesh quality and often force the mesher to generate extremely small elements at localised regions — degrading solve time and solution accuracy. Argus can identify these features by size threshold and remove or merge them automatically.

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Idealisations

For thin-walled structures, Argus can extract mid-surfaces and replace the solid geometry with shell representations suitable for structural or thermal analysis. It can also create beam idealisations from cylindrical features such as pipes or struts.

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Repair validation

After cleanup, Argus will confirm that the geometry is watertight, manifold, and free of the issues it targeted — giving you a structured report to review before handing off to the mesher.

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Supported environments

Geometry cleanup with Argus runs natively inside:

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Example prompts

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Cleanup before meshing: a typical workflow

A structured cleanup sequence that works well as an Argus prompt chain:
1

Import and inspect

Start with a full geometry report before making any changes. This gives you a baseline and prevents unnecessary operations.
2

Heal translation defects

Fix structural issues first — these are blockers that can prevent defeaturing tools from working correctly.
3

Defeature for simulation

Apply simulation-specific simplification rules.
4

Validate

Confirm the model is ready to mesh.

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Tips for geometry cleanup prompts

  • Set size thresholds explicitly — “remove fillets below 1mm” is actionable; “remove small fillets” is ambiguous. Give Argus a number to work to.
  • Protect important faces — Tell Argus which faces must not change: load application surfaces, mounting interfaces, datum references. This avoids unintended simplification at critical regions.
  • Separate inspection from repair — Ask for a report first, review it, then instruct cleanup. This gives you control over what gets changed and prevents unwanted modifications.
  • State the target mesh size — Cleanup thresholds are relative to mesh size. Telling Argus “my target mesh size is 2mm” lets it calibrate what counts as a problematic small feature.
  • Use rules for assemblies — Rules-based prompts scale much better than feature-by-feature instructions on assemblies with many bodies. “Remove all features below X” across the whole assembly is more reliable than targeting each body individually.
  • Validate before handing off — Always ask Argus to run a final health check before passing geometry to the mesher. A watertight, manifold solid is the minimum bar.