An Object Oriented Approach to Geometry Defeaturing for Finite Element Meshing

7th International Meshing Roundtable, Sandia National Labs, pp.547-563, October 1998

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

7th International Meshing Roundtable
October 26-28, 1998
Dearborn, Michigan, U.S.A.

ANSYS Design Development Department
ANSYS, Inc.
Canonsburg, PA USA

Abstract
Automatic finite element mesh generation of CAD generated data has been a goal of finite element meshing codes for years. However, the lack of accuracy and the amount of detail in this data have made this a daunting task. In essence, the CAD data needs to be defeatured to overcome these accuracy deficiencies and to remove excessive detail. In this paper an object-oriented approach to automatic geometry defeaturing is presented. The geometric and finite element data abstractions are given with the basic algorithms used. These algorithms deal with near tangency's, lack of coincident edge precision, poor intersection curve accuracy, and small geometrical features. Along with is discussion, examples of all these types of defeaturing ar given.

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