On the quantification of errors of a pre-processing effort reducing contact meshing approach

Abstract

The generation of a suitable all-hexahedral (all-hex) meshed model of a specific design model is one of the main tasks within the pre-processing for creating the analysis model. In contrast to tetrahedral meshing, all-hex meshing requires additional preparation of the geometry for mesh generation due to the absence of a robust and reliable automatic hex meshing algorithm [1]. The usage of all-hex meshes is motivated by the fact that they mostly contain fewer nodes and elements than all-tetrahedral meshes at similar or even higher result quality. Besides, the mesh locking effect is still a serious shortcoming of linear tetrahedral elements [2-3]. The usage of quadratic tetrahedral elements with less mesh locking issues is often not recommendable due to the required higher computational effort. Therefore, the development of a general-purpose all-hex mesh generation procedure is in the focus of the research community since a long time. Promising progress has been made recently in the field of automatic hex mesh generation for specific problem cases [4-7] and great potential to improve the overall pre-processing efficiency show Knowledge Based Engineering (KBE) tools [8]. The problem, however, is that there is no approach which is able to automatically mesh complex assemblies with all-hex meshes as it is required for large complex simulations. Therefore a method has been developed which will be discussed in this paper in more details. The procedure to generate an all-hex meshed model can be classified in two main approaches. The mesh-first approach creates a finite element mesh which is subsequently modified and transferred on a geometrical model. In contrast, the geometryfirst approach creates the mesh through filling the geometric representation of the model with finite elements using model boundary framework. In this work, a Contact Meshing Approach is presented for the pre-processing