Global Engineering and Materials, Inc. — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: N20A-T004

Description

Global Engineering and Materials, Inc. (GEM) along with its team members Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and HexSpline3D propose to develop a novel hybrid modeling approach for automatic and interactive mesh generation using predominately hexahedral finite elements for naval aviation structures. The hybrid approach consists of a global geometric decomposition, an initial hex-dominant mesh generation via a polycube-based approach, and a subsequent local merging of tetrahedral elements into high-quality and feature-aligned hexahedral elements using a vertex-based tet-merging approach to maximize the hexahedral element proportion. The polycube-based approach will be enhanced to perform automatic domain decomposition to achieve a hex-dominant finite element partition that satisfies quality metrics. An option will be included to allow the user to modify the partition and control the mesh size. A suite of verification and demonstration examples will be applied to illustrate the accuracy and efficiency of the developed meshing tool starting from using basic shapes and increasing the complexity up to a representative aircraft component. Modeling efficiency and the meshing quality will be demonstrated via model predictions using a commercial finite element software such as ABAQUS.