Octree-based Multiple-material Parallel Unstructured Mesh Generation Method for Seismic Response Analysis of Soil-Structure Systems

We developed an unstructured finite element mesh generation method capable of modeling multiple-material complex geometry problems for large-scale seismic analysis of soil-structure systems. We used an octree structure to decompose the target domain into small subdomains and use the multiple material marching cubes method for robust and parallel tetrahedralization of each subdomain. By using the developed method on a 32 core shared memory machine, we could generate a 594,168,792 tetrahedral element soil-structure model of a power plant in 13h 01min. The validity of the generated model was confirmed by conducting a seismic response analysis on 2,304 compute nodes of the K computer at RIKEN. Although the model contains a small approximation in geometry (half of the minimum octree size) at present, we can expect fast and high quality meshing of large-scale models by making geometry correction in the future, which is expected to help improve the seismic safety of important structures and complex urban systems