Selective Refinement of Two and Three-Dimensional Finite Element Meshes

Master's Thesis, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Brigham Young University, 1996

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

Matt Staten is currently employed at ANSYS Inc. in Cannonsburg PA.

excerpt from Introduction
The purpose of my research was to create a set of tools to allow a user to interactively select and refine portions of three-dimensional finite element meshes. The goal was to develop an algorithm that is general enough to allow for the refinement of meshes which are composed of any standard mesh element, namely tetrahedra, pyramids, wedges, and hexahedra or any combination of these standard elements. This refinement is a preprocessing step for a finite element analysis solver.

Since finite element analysis and meshes are only useful for computer models, I have implemented the entire algorithm discussed in this thesis to demonstrate that my algorithm is not only possible, but also feasible and reliable. All code for this algorithm was written in the C computer language. In addition, I used the software Groundwater Modeling System (hereafter referred to as GMS) as a test bed for my code. GMS is a pre and post processor for the finite element analysis code "FEMWATER" which uses three-dimensional finite element meshes to define groundwater flow.

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