Introduction to Mesh Generation with ANSYS Workbench

Springer tracts in mechanical engineering, 2018

The quality of a mesh is crucially important if FEM solutions are to be deemed acceptable. Too coarse a mesh will lead to inaccurate FEM solutions. The finer the mesh, the better the convergence of the numerical solution. However, finer meshes tend to be expensive in terms of computing resources. The experienced user of FEM would have, over time, developed the skills required for creating just the right mesh for a given problem. Becoming proficient users of FEA, with the ability to create representative meshes of the idealized physical problem will serve as a motivation for this chapter. This chapter presents fundamentals of finite element meshes by defining nodes and elements, and the different types of elements. The chapter also describes the principle behind meshing algorithms in commercial FEM solvers. This chapter concludes by presenting reflections on quality of meshes and the type of meshes needed for different type of practical problems. It is expected that at the end of this chapter, readers should have developed a holistic understanding of the effects of meshes to the FEM process.

International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, 1983

The development and implementation of a comprehensive interactive computer package for the generation of finite element meshes for two-dimensional problems is described. The package, AGTHOM, minimizes the user defined input and attempts to maximize the flexibility for the user with regard to modifying the mesh. An important feature of AGTHOM is its independence of expensive graphics hardware by using approximate terminal plots. Versions are available in both extended BASIC and FORTRAN.

Advances in Engineering Software (1978), 1979

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36th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit, 1998

Mesh (de-)re nement. This problem can be cast

Engineering with Computers, 1996

HEXAR, a new software product developed at Cray Research, Inc., automatically generates good quality meshes directly from surface data produced by computeraided design (CAD) packages. The HEXAR automatic mesh generator is based on a proprietary and parallel algorithm that relies on pattern recognition, local mesh refinement and coarsening, and variational mesh smoothing techniques to create all-hexahedral volume meshes. HEXAR generates grids two to three orders of magnitude faster than current manual approaches. Although approximate by design, the resulting meshes have qualities acceptable by many commercial structural and CFD (computational fluid dynamics) software. HEXAR turns mesh generation into an automatic process .for most commercial engineerin 9 applications.

Encyclopedia of Computational Mechanics, 2004

In this chapter we are concerned with mesh generation methods and mesh adaptivity issues. Nowadays, many techniques are available to complete meshes of arbitrary domains for computational purposes. Planar, surface and volume meshing have been automated to a large extent. Over the last few years, meshing activities have focused on adaptive schemes where the features of a solution field must be accurately captured. To this end, meshing techniques must be revisited in order to be capable of completing high quality meshes conforming to these features. Error estimates are therefore used to analyze the solution field at a given stage and, based on the results and the information they yield, adapted meshes are created before computing the next stage of the solution field. A number of novel meshing issues must be addressed including how to construct a mesh adapted to what the error estimate prescribes, how to validate and construct high-order meshes, how to handle large size meshes, how to consider moving boundary problems, etc.

1991

This paper deals with key aspects of the coupling of automatic mesh generation with adaptive analysis and shape optimisation of planar and surface structures. Adaptive analysis requires the design of nearly optimal meshes with varying element sizes to achieve a prescribed accuracy. In any shape optimisation process as the region to be discretised changes continuously and sometimes dreustically, mesh generation should ideally take place without intervention by the analyst and without any excessive distortion of elements. To carry out these processes in a fully automatic and efficient manner a highly robust, versatile and flexible mesh generator is required. A brief introduction to the features of one such automatic mesh generator, based on the advancing front method, is described. Several examples are presented exploiting the potential of this mesh generator for adaptive analysis and shape optimisation. The integration of the rnesh generator with these procedures is discussed as well as some issues which required special attention.

Research in Engineering Design, 1999

This paper presents a method to integrate in a better way the finite element method in the CAD/CAM process for two-dimensional problems, through efficient and automatic meshing and remeshing procedures. During the design step, the lack of integration between geometric modeling and numerical analysis remains a crucial problem and it still tends to restrain the use of finite element methods to a small number of engineers. Here we tackle the problem of the automatic remeshing of an object in the context of minor changes in its geometry and topology without restarting the mesh generation from the beginning. We have developed a mesh generator that is able to adapt a previous mesh, through two complementary strategies (for 2D cases) to a new geometry without destroying the whole initial discretization. We also present the possible extension of these concepts to three-dimensional problems.

Advances in Engineering Software, 2016

We analyze the state of development practices for Mesh Generation and Mesh Processing (MGMP) software by comparing 27 MGMP projects. The analysis employs a reproducible method based on a grading template of 56 questions covering 13 software qualities. The software is ranked using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a multicriteria decision making method appropriate for cases with a mix of qualitative and quantitative factors. The results reveal concerns regarding the maintainability, usability, reusability and performance of some MGMP software. Five recommendations are presented as feedback to the MGMP community: (i) Use an issue tracker for bug management and support requests. (ii) Document performance measures. (iii) Increase the use of libraries to promote software re-use to avoid "re-inventing the wheel." (iv) Improve reproducibility by recording the set up details for the development and testing environments. (v) Improve confidence in correctness through requirements specification, formal specification languages, and automated testing.

Proceedings of CAD'19, 2019