Orphan nodes and elements are components of a finite element mesh that exist without any associated geometry. In effect, the mesh information has been orphaned from its parent geometry. Orphan nodes and elements can be created in several ways; they can be:
Imported from an output database (for more information, see “Importing a part from an output database,” Section 10.7.12)
Imported from an Abaqus input file (for more information, see “Importing a model,” Section 10.8)
Created as a mesh part (for more information, see “Creating a mesh part,” Section 17.20 )
Created in a bottom-up meshing procedure (for more information, see “Bottom-up meshing,” Section 17.11)
Created by certain mesh editing operations, such as create element and offset (for more information, see “An overview of the mesh editing tools,” Section 64.4)
Created by deleting the associativity with their parent geometry (for more information, see “Deleting mesh-geometry associativity,” Section 64.7.12 )
The first three methods above create an orphan mesh feature as the base feature of a new part. The remaining methods are part of the Edit Mesh toolset; these methods edit the existing mesh and, therefore, do not exist as features of the part. For more information, see Chapter 64, “The Edit Mesh toolset.”
You can select the face of an orphan element as the sketch plane to add geometric features. In addition, in the Mesh module you can change the element type assigned to orphan elements, and you can verify and edit the mesh.