Mesh matching - Creating conforming interfaces between hexahedral meshes

Abstract

This paper presents a new method for handling non-conforming hexahedralto- hexahedral interfaces. One or both of the adjacent hexahedralmeshes are locally modified to create a one-to-onemapping between between themesh nodes and quadrilaterals at the interface allowing a conforming mesh to be created. In the finite element method, non-conforming interfaces are currently handled using constraint conditions such as gapelements, tied contacts, or multi-point constraints. By creating a conforming mesh, the need for constraint conditions is eliminated resulting in a smoother, more precise numerical solution. The method presented in this paper uses hexahedral dual operations, including pillowing, sheet extraction, dicing and column collapse operations, to affect the local mesh modifications. In addition, an extension to pillowing, called sheet inflation, is introduced to handle the insertion of self-intersecting and self-touching sheets. The quality of the resultant conforming hexahedral mesh is high and the increase in number of elements is moderate.