Abstract

Generating all hexahedral meshes on arbitrary geometries has been an area of important research in recent history. Hexahedral meshes have advantages over tetrahedral meshes in structural mechanics because they provide more accurate results with fewer degrees of freedom. Many different approaches have been used to create all-hexahedral meshes. Grid-based, inside-out, or superposition meshing all refer to a similar meshing approach that is a very common mesh generation technique. Grid-based algorithms provide the ability to generate all hexahedral meshes by introducing a structured mesh that bounds the complete body modeled, marking hexahedra to define an interior and exterior mesh, manipulating the boundary region between interior and exterior regions of the structured mesh to fit the specific boundary of the body, and finally, discarding the exterior hexahedra from the given body. Such algorithms generally provide high quality meshes on the interior of the body yet distort element at the boundary in order to fill voids and match surfaces along these regions. The sculpting algorithm as presented here, addresses the difficulty in forming quality elements near boundary regions in two ways. The algorithm first finds more intelligent methods to define a structured mesh that conforms to the body to lessen large distortions to the boundary elements. Second, the algorithm uses collapsing templates to adjust the position of boundary elements to mimic the topology of the body prior to capturing the geometric boundary.

Degree

College and Department

Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology; Civil and Environmental Engineering

Rights

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