Strand7's automatic mesher: soon to be launched
December 2000
Since late last year, Allyson Lawless, the well-known supplier of civil engineering software, has been marketing Strand7 - a low-cost yet powerful finite element package from Australia.This year has seen a number of sales - with the product holding appeal in many market sectors including the design of bridges, scaffolding, boat hulls, marine structures and plant. The Australian Strand from G+D has been in the market less than 10 years, but its power versus the modest pricing when talking finite elements, means that it has fast gained acceptance worldwide. The demands made on the product as a result of the complex modelling carried out by many clients has dictated the need to develop an automatic mesher.
This mesh consists of 109 797 tetrahedral elements. A particular feature of this mesh is the thin plate-like sections. Here, a single element correctly spans the through-thickness direction. Model courtesy of K Walsh Consulting
For the past three years the development team at G+D Computing has been hard at work with this module which consists of a quad-dominant surface mesher together with a tetrahedral solid mesher. Both have been developed and implemented from scratch based on their own research and development. Over the past twelve months the team's efforts in this area have intensified and the current phase of the project is now nearing completion.
This model of a lever was saved as a SAT file in SolidWorks and imported into Strand7. The surface mesher generated 2468 quadrilateral plate elements. This mesh was fed into the tet mesher which used the quadilaterals to generate 16166 tetrahedral elements
Much of the development work has centred around automatically generating good quality meshes with a minimum amount of user interaction from arbitrary surface data. Both analytical (eg plane, cylinder, cone, torus, sphere) and NURBS surfaces are supported. The meshers also address a number of potential CAD anomalies such as T-junctions (where multiple surface patches meet a single surface patch) and very narrow surface segments. The surface mesher can create both linear (Quad4) and quadratic (Quad8) quadrilaterals. The tet mesher can generate both linear (Tetra4) and quadratic (Tetra10) elements.
This is a simple CAD model generated as a tutorial in SolidWorks. The surface mesh consists of 1860 triangular elements. The solid mesh consists of 5201 tetrahedral elements
The Strand7 mesher supports the ACIS file format known as SAT for the input of geometry data. The SAT format is currently supported by a number of CAD systems such as AutoCAD and SolidWorks. For simplified geometry, Strand7's own basic geometry input can be used.
Three parts were automatically meshed to create this model of the pliers, consisting of 12 681 tetrahedral elements
Strand7 Release 2.0 will be available before the end of the year. The launch in South Africa will coincide with the Strand7 developer visiting Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town in early November.
This model is one of the standard AutoCAD surface models. The resulting surface mesh consists of 7822 predominantly quad elements
Allyson Lawless
(011) 476 4100
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