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CUBIT Mesh Generation Toolkit

Sandia National Laboratories

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

MESH/GRID
GENERATION
SOFTWARE
SURVEY

Contact: Steven J. Owen

Email: sjowen@sandia.gov

Web Site: http://cubit.sandia.gov

Availability: Research Code, Stand-alone Mesh/Grid Generator

    Binaries of this code may be obtained for non-commercial, research use or test and evaluation purposes via ftp, with signed license agreement from Sandia National Laboratories. This code or parts there of have also been integrated in several commercial products including MSC/Patran and Fluent/Gambit.

Customer Support: Yes

Approximate Number of Users: 400+

Platform: UNIX (SGI, SUN Solaris, HPUX)

Input: Native, SAT

    Acis SAT, FastQ (Sandia), ExodusII (mesh file)

Engineering Discipline: Structural, Thermal, Electro Magnetic

    Structural mechanics (transient dynamics, quasi-statics, statics), Thermal, Electro-magnetic

Elements: Triangle, Quadrilateral, Tetrahedra, Hexahedra, Pyramid

Surface Meshing: Yes

Tri/Tet Method:

    Purchased commercial software from MSC/Aries (CAEP).

Quad/Hex Method: Advancing Front, Sweeping, Mapped Meshing, Geometry Decomposition

    Advancing Front/quads and hexes. Mapped Meshing/quads/hexes. Submap meshing/quads/hexes(virtual decomposition of blocks into mapped regions). Multi-source sweeping/hexes. Manual Geometry Decomposition on geometry to use other techniques, Automatic Feauture Based Decomposition on geometry to use other techniques (Purchased from University of Wisconsin at Madison).

Element Sizing Method: Manual, Automatic based on feature sizes

    Both manual local (down to curve level) and global. Automatic based on feature size for surfaces and curves. Currently all sizes propagate to curves and are used for surface meshing The surface mesh size then dictates the size of the volume mesh.

Other Features:

    Hex/tet/pyramid automatic hybrid meshing, advancing front hex meshing to mesh most (by volume) of parts, then fills remaining interior with tets. An interface option for the hexes and tets is putting in pyramids. Also have "tet dicing" which is splitting tets into hexes. We have several smoothing approaches used in morphing meshes, sweeping meshes, fixing inverted meshes.  These approaches are used for tris/tets/quads/hexes.

Comments:

    1) Quick turn around meshes. Supported by:
    • Tetrahedral/split tetrahedral/hex-tet (mixed) mesh generation for more "first order" analysis.

    2) Large all hexahedral, multi-material conformal meshes Supported by:
    • Manual and automatic geometry decomposition. Automatic/manual mesh sizing. Automatic scheme selection (choses the correct meshing tool, sweeping (which way to sweep), submaping, or mapping). Automatic interval assignment for getting local mapping/submapping/paving contraints to globally work. Multi-source sweeping, submapping and mapping for actual mesh generation. Mesh smoothing for imporving quality of mesh.

    3) Research of more automatic meshing techniques.
    Algorithms currently worked on:

    • Whisker Weaving (advancing front dual meshing).
    • Multi-source/target sweeping (Similar idea to Cooper Tool from Ted Blacker).
    • Advanced hex smoothing.