New Brick Element Mesher

In ADINA Version 8.2, the fully automatic generation of brick element dominant meshes is enhanced by the addition of a new mesh generator to the one that is currently available in version 8.1. Some examples of the mesh produced by this new mesh generator are shown above.

The new mesher decomposes a given body into polyhedra by intersecting it with a background Cartesian grid. Depending upon their complexity, these polyhedra are meshed either with brick elements/hexahedra (and possibly some pyramids) or tetrahedra. Typically, a polyhedron is considered complex if it is not convex. This approach gives some structure to this free-form mesh generation process since the body is effectively discretized into structured polyhedra.

The following tables give the number of hexahedra, prisms, pyramids, and tetrahedra generated by the new mesher in ADINA 8.2 for the above test cases with a given uniform mesh density. For comparison, meshing statistics are also given for the existing mesher in ADINA 8.1 (for the same mesh density). It can be seen that the new mesher produces a majority of hexahedra, unlike the mesher in ADINA 8.1. Note that in some cases the number of elements is larger using the new mesher because the number of layers through a geometric thickness has increased.