Conformal assembly meshing with tolerant imprinting

Abstract

Solid assembly meshing has all of the same "dirty geometry" induced issues as single part meshing but also has the difficulty associated with generating a conformal mesh between solids where solid-solid interfaces are not obvious. Mesh generators usually don't have CAD assembly constraint information to identify interfacing solids and must therefore rely on geometric proximity to deduce these interactions. "Slop" in the positioning and alignment of parts in the assembly makes automatically discovering the interfaces and generating a conformal mesh at the interfaces very difficult. Most of the efforts in this area resort to some sort of discrete representation to deal with these issues losing the capability to do further solid modeling engine operations often necessary for all-hexahedral meshing. This paper presents a method for defining the non-manifold interfaces between volumes in an assembly required for generating a conformal mesh while maintaining the original solid modeling engine format.