Generation of mesh variants via volumetrical representation and subsequent mesh optimisation

Abstract

Having reliable finite element (FE) meshes is one of the basics of reliable FE simulations. As development times i.e. in the car industry are expected to decrease, engineers need to edit and optimise FE meshes without access to the underlying CAD geometry. If meshes are not only locally effected by the editing operation, simple mesh optimisations such as mesh relaxation or local remeshing are not sufficient to make the mesh suitable for numerical simulation again and global remeshing is needed. To avoid the traditionally used time-consuming remeshing strategy, we developed a tool to remesh an FE surface model - taking into account the needs for good FE meshes - via volumes. We first voxelise the surface and then generate a new quad mesh via isosurface extraction and subsequent mesh optimisation. This method provides the opportunity to directly couple editing operations on the volumetrical representation with the remeshing procedure. © 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.