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Hexahedral Mesh Matching: Converting non‐conforming hexahedral‐to‐hexahedral interfaces into conforming interfaces
Author(s) -
Staten Matthew L.,
Shepherd Jason F.,
Ledoux Franck,
Shimada Kenji
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
international journal for numerical methods in engineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.421
H-Index - 168
eISSN - 1097-0207
pISSN - 0029-5981
DOI - 10.1002/nme.2800
Subject(s) - hexahedron , polygon mesh , finite element method , mesh generation , matching (statistics) , quadrilateral , tetrahedron , topology (electrical circuits) , computer science , computational science , engineering , geometry , mathematics , structural engineering , combinatorics , statistics
This paper presents a new method, called Mesh Matching, for handling non‐conforming hexahedral‐to‐hexahedral interfaces for finite element analysis. Mesh Matching modifies the hexahedral element topology on one or both sides of the interface until there is a one‐to‐one pairing of finite element nodes, edges and quadrilaterals on the interface surfaces, allowing mesh entities to be merged into a single conforming mesh. Element topology is modified using hexahedral dual operations, including pillowing, sheet extraction, dicing and column collapsing. The primary motivation for this research is to simplify the generation of unstructured all‐hexahedral finite element meshes. Mesh Matching relaxes global constraint propagation which currently hinders hexahedral meshing of large assemblies, and limits its extension to parallel processing. As a secondary benefit, by providing conforming mesh interfaces, Mesh Matching provides an alternative to artificial constraints such as tied contacts and multi‐point constraints. The quality of the resultant conforming hexahedral mesh is high and the increase in number of elements is moderate. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.