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

Liang Sun, Christopher M. Tierney, Cecil G. Armstrong, Trevor T. Robinson

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

8 Citations (Scopus)
34 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)431-447
Number of pages17
JournalEngineering with Computers
Volume34
Issue number3
Early online date27 Nov 2017
DOIs
Publication statusPublished (in print/issue) - 1 Jul 2018

Keywords

  • Automatic decomposition
  • Efficient meshing
  • Geometry reasoning
  • Hex-dominant meshing
  • Long-slender region identification
  • Sweep meshing

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