Automatic, Parallel and Fault Tolerant Mesh Generation from CAD

Engineering with Computers, Springer-Verlag, Vol 12, pp.178-185, December 1996

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

Applications Division, Cray Research Inc., Minneapolis, USA

Abstract
HEXAR, a new software product developed at Cray Research, Inc., automatically generates good quality meshes directly from surface data produced by computer aided design (CAD) packages. The HEXAR automatic mesh generator is based on a proprietary and parallel algorithm that relies on pattern recognition, local mesh refinement and coarsening, and variational mesh smoothing techniques to create all-hexahedral volume meshes. HEXAR generates grids two to three orders of magnitude faster than current manual approaches. Although approximate by design, the resulting meshes have qualities acceptable by many commercial structural and CFD (computational fluid dynamics) software. HEXAR turns mesh generation into an automatic process for most commercial engineering applications.