CURRENT STATUS AND TRENDS IN AUTOMATIC MESH GENERATION FOR GEOMETRIC MODELLING SYSTEMS.

Abstract

In most engineering applications, it is necessary to conduct analyses, eg thermal, stress or flow analysis, to ensure that the product will be able to meet a set of operational criteria. With objects of complicated geometry, numerical techniques requiring global 'discretization' of the object, such as finite element, boundary element or finite difference, are usually adopted. To this end a three-dimensional mesh needs to be generated and experience has shown that this is an expensive, time-consuming and error-prone process. The geometric modeling system is designed to model an unambiguous representation of the object to be modeled. And so the automatic generation of mesh for analysis purposes from the geometric model is a logical application area that would significantly improve the overall efficiency of the design process. This paper discusses the various methods of automatic mesh generation from a geometrical model and the current research trend in this area with particular reference to the finite element method.