If your Nondesign spaces are tearing off, your result looks something like the picture below.
If a boundary condition is applied on one of these Nondesign spaces an error will occur and the optimization will stop. The model is no longer complete and it doesn’t make sense to continue with the optimization.
If no boundary condition is applied on one of these Nondesign spaces, a warning will occur but the optimization will continue.
Reasons why the Nondesign spaces are tearing off:
either no force or displacement is applied → no stresses are available for the stress optimization to prevent the material from being reduced
or the force applied is too small
or the additional fixation is not needed for the defined boundary conditions and optimization constraints
Steps to prevent this behaviour:
Prevent the tearing off by:
increasing the Complexity → more elements are available and a finer model is possible (calculation effort increases!)
reducing the optimization stress goal
increasing the applied force so that the stresses and therefore the relevance of the Nondesign space is increased
creating an extra load case in which fixations and loads are switched
Either it is a design proposal you can accept/want to achieve in order to reduce the number of fixation points
To reduce the number of fixations, the fixation has to be applied on all Nondesign spaces at once as one boundary condition (multi-selection)
Thus individual Fixations can tear off without an ocurring error
Boundary condition mutli-selection of Nondesign spaces to enable tearing off of Fixations.