Voxel-based meshing and unit-cell analysis of textile composites

International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Vol 56, Num 7, pp.977 - 1006, February 2003

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

Abstract

Unit-cell homogenization techniques are frequently used together with the finite element method to compute effective mechanical properties for a wide range of different composites and heterogeneous materials systems. For systems with very complicated material arrangements, mesh generation can be a considerable obstacle to usage of these techniques. In this work, pixel-based (2D) and voxel-based (3D) meshing concepts borrowed from image processing are thus developed and employed to construct the finite element models used in computing the micro-scale stress and strain fields in the composite. The potential advantage of these techniques is that generation of unit-cell models can be automated, thus requiring far less human time than traditional finite element models. Essential ideas and algorithms for implementation of proposed techniques are presented. In addition, a new error estimator based on sensitivity of virtual strain energy to mesh refinement is presented and applied. The computational costs and rate of convergence for the proposed methods are presented for three different mesh-refinement algorithms: uniform refinement; selective refinement based on material boundary resolution; and adaptive refinement based on error estimation.