Steps Towards Smooth CAD-FEM Integration

Numerical Grid Generation in Computational Field Simulations, Ed. M. Cross., B. K. Soni, J. F. Thompson, J. Hauser, P. R. Eiseman, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference, held at the University of Greenwich, pp.705-714, July 1998

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

Alla Sheffer, Michel Bercovier
Institute of Computer Science, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91904, Israel.
e-mail: sheffaccs.huji.ac.il

Ted Blacker
Fluent Inc., 500 Davis St., Suite 600, Evanston, Illinois 60201, USA.
e-mail: ted@fiuent.com

Abstract
The process of meshing CAD generated models, consists of two major parts: generation of meshable models from the CAD data and the subsequent meshing of the models. The editing of the CAD data prior to meshing is required to obtain models suitable both for the analysis objectives and the available meshing algorithms. Such editing includes topology correction and validation, detail suppression and decomposition. Editing the geometry directly (e.g. surface redefinitions) is cumbersome, tedious, and expensive. Introducing virtual topology allows such operations as modifications to the topology only. In this paper the process of transforming CAD data into meshable models is demonstrated on several case studies of different complexity.