Advances in both software and computer hardware have made the finite element method the preeminent choice for analyzing highly complex systems that are of great value to the Department of Defense. The US Defense industry, however, continues to spend enormous time and resources in mesh generation, a key step in finite element analysis, despite progress that has been made in automated mesh generation using tetrahedral elements. There is a widespread agreement that for accurate and efficient analysis of complex structures, one must employ hexahedral elements. However, even today very few codes exist that can automatically discretize a complex structure using hexahedral elements directly from a CAD (Computer-Aided-Design) file that is available in STEP (Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data), IGES (The Initial Graphics Exchange Standard) or any other geometry exchange standards. The M4 Engineering/Virginia Tech team, which has worked together on several SBIR and STTRs, proposes a novel scheme that leverages the previous work in the literature on automated feature recognition from the STEP and IGES files for automated manufacturing purposes to develop a software tool for automatically generating hexahedral dominant mesh directly from CAD files. The program will be light-weight, meaning it will economize memory utilization so that it can run on a low-memory (e.g., 4GB) machine. The automated feature recognition system will be based on parsing the graphics exchange standards using an object-oriented language (for reducing memory requirements) to divide the complex structure into geometries that are easily amenable to automated hexahedral meshing using existing approaches.
Benefit: The proposed technology will greatly reduce the time required to produce robust/accurate finite element models of complex structures. As such, it will find broad application across the civil, mechanical, and aerospace engineering fields. Individual users will be able to turn-around their analysis jobs much more quickly by eliminating most if not all of the time-consuming interactive mesh development presently required. Furthermore, structural optimization iterations which involve generating a range of models from a parameter design space will be made to be more robust using such automated hex meshing. In addition to saving engineering time, the improved modeling efficiency can also reduce the electrical power consumed. M4 Engineering will pursue licensing the technology to major and minor CAE vendors, in addition to providing a stand-alone tool to the Navy and other DoD or commercial customers. Finally, M4 will be a user of this technology itself and will have a competitive advantage when bidding on lucrative commercial analysis work.
Keywords: Computational Efficiency, Computational Efficiency, CAD, Software tool, Finite Element Analysis, Automated Model Preprocessing, Hexahedral Meshing
