Mesh Errors

If you only have 2 minutes

Element quality is set by your geometry and Dr.Q's automatic mesher; you can't dial it to a target directly. When meshing fails or quality is flagged, the real lever is almost always cleaning up the geometry. One meshing setting, small-feature suppression, is worth knowing about (Error 277). The quality warnings are advisory. See Mesh Quality for what the quality number means.

Meshing failed: degenerate elements (Error 207)

The mesher could not build valid elements, so it reports degenerate elements and stops. This almost always comes from the geometry: slivers, tiny features, or very thin walls that force impossibly stretched elements. The fix is upstream, in the CAD: see Geometry Errors for how to clean up and re-export.

Small-feature suppression failed (Error 277)

Dr.Q can defeature small details before meshing so they don't dominate the local element size. When that suppression fails, the message says the detection_size_factor was probably too large: a large factor tries to swallow a feature it can't cleanly remove.

• Lower detection_size_factor (for example, halve it; it must stay in (0, 1]).
• If the "small" feature actually matters for the result, don't suppress it: keep it (the default handling) and refine the mesh there instead.

Quality warnings (advisory)

These do not stop the run; they flag reliability:

• Warning 3: Dr.Q fell back to uniform refinement because the requested refinement needed a tet mesh. Nothing to do.
• Warning 4: the mesh's worst element is below the quality threshold. Results near those elements may be less reliable. Improve it the same way as Error 207, by cleaning up the geometry, or accept it if the low-quality elements are away from the region you care about.

Often there is nothing to fix: quality follows from the geometry and the mesher, so if the geometry is already clean, a quality warning may just be the best the mesher can do for that shape.