Energy-Minimizing Approach to Meshing Curved Wire-Frame Models

In the initial phase of structural part design, wire-frame models are sometimes used to represent the shapes of curved faces. Finite element analysis (FEA) of the curved faces requires that a well-shaped, well-sized mesh be smoothly generated on them. The algorithm described in this paper generates such a mesh from a wireframe model by the following three steps: (1) projection of the vertices of a given wire-frame model on a at plane and generation of a 2D mesh on the plane, (2) generation of a triangulation-based surface by minimization of the strain energy of a thin-plate-bending model, and (3) tting of the mesh to the triangulation-based surface. The algorithm can generate well-shaped, well-sized triangular or quadrilateral meshes on the curved faces. keywords. mesh generation, FEM, CAE