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An approach for extracting non-manifold mid-surfaces of thin-wall solids using chordal axis transform

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Abstract

This paper proposes an approach for extracting non-manifold mid-surfaces of thin-wall solids using the chordal axis transform (CAT) (Prasad in CNLS Newsletter—Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratory, vol 139, 1997). There is great demand for extracting mid-surfaces as it is used in dimension reduction. Quadros and Shimada previously used CAT in extracting 2-manifold mid-surfaces of a particular type of thin-wall solids. The proposed approach is an extension of the previous approach (Quadros and Shimada in 11th international meshing roundtable, 2002) in order to extract non-manifold mid-surfaces of general thin-wall solids. The three steps involved in extracting the mid-surface of a thin-wall solid are: (1) generating a tet mesh of a thin-wall solid without inserting interior nodes; (2) generating a raw mid-surface by smart cutting of tets; and (3) remeshing the raw mid-surface via smart clean-up. In the proposed approach, a discrete model (i.e., a tet mesh without any interior nodes) is used instead of working directly on a CAD model. The smart cutting of tets using CAT yields correct topology at the non-manifold region in the raw mid-surface. As the raw mid-surface is not directly suitable for engineering purposes, it is trimmed using a smart clean-up procedure and then remeshed. The proposed approach has been implemented using C++ in commercial ALGOR finite element analysis software. The proposed approach is computationally efficient and has shown effective results on industrial models.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Visual Kinematics, Inc. (VKI) for providing tet meshes without interior points and Dr. Hanzhou Zhang for providing initial tet meshes. Also, thanks to CoreTech System (Moldex3D), Eastern Instruments, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington and other ALGOR customers for providing test cases.

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  1. ALGOR, Inc, 150 Beta Drive, Pittsburgh, PA, 15238, USA

    William Roshan Quadros

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  1. William Roshan Quadros
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Correspondence to William Roshan Quadros.

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Quadros, W.R. An approach for extracting non-manifold mid-surfaces of thin-wall solids using chordal axis transform. Engineering with Computers 24, 305–319 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00366-008-0094-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00366-008-0094-1

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