An enhanced approach to automatic decomposition of thin-walled components for hexahedral-dominant meshing

Hexahedral (hex) meshes can be generated for CAD models of complex thin-walled components by isolating thin-sheet and long-slender regions, quad meshing one of the bounding faces, and sweeping the quad mesh through the volume to create hex elements. Continuing the work in Sun et al. (Proc Eng 163:22...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEngineering with computers Vol. 34; no. 3; pp. 431 - 447
Main Authors Sun, Liang, Tierney, Christopher M., Armstrong, Cecil G., Robinson, Trevor T.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London Springer London 01.07.2018
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
CAE) and Design
Calculus of Variations and Optimal Control; Optimization
Classical Mechanics
Computer Science
Computer-Aided Engineering (CAD
Control
Decomposition
Degrees of freedom
Finite element method
Math. Applications in Chemistry
Mathematical and Computational Engineering
Meshing
Original Article
Systems Theory
Long-slender region identification
Geometry reasoning
Hex-dominant meshing
Automatic decomposition
Efficient meshing
Sweep meshing
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Summary:Hexahedral (hex) meshes can be generated for CAD models of complex thin-walled components by isolating thin-sheet and long-slender regions, quad meshing one of the bounding faces, and sweeping the quad mesh through the volume to create hex elements. Continuing the work in Sun et al. (Proc Eng 163:225–237, 2016 ), where an improved approach to thin-sheet identification was presented, an enhanced automatic method for long-slender region identification is proposed in this paper. The objective is to improve the efficiency and decomposition quality compared to existing long-slender region identification processes. Geometric measures such as the edge length and the face width are employed to generate sizing measures, which are in turn used to identify candidate long-slender regions. Careful consideration is given to the generation and positioning of the cutting faces required to isolate the long-slender regions by assessing a priori quad mesh quality on the wall faces. It is shown that a significant reduction in the number of degrees of freedom (DOF) can be achieved by applying anisotropic hex elements on the identified regions.
ISSN:0177-0667
1435-5663
DOI:10.1007/s00366-017-0550-x