Fully-Automatic Object-Based Generation of Hexahedral Meshes

ICEM AutoHexa is a high-speed, object-based, fully-automated, high-quality, body-fitted hexahedral mesher that can be used to create unstructured hexahedral meshes. The input to ICEM AutoHexa is a set of axis aligned blocks, rectangles, cylinders, discs, and triangular prisms. Associated to each object are meshing parameters that control the density of the mesh. Because the geometric coverage is restricted the meshing process can be completely automated. The mesher is object based in the sense that each geometric object such as a block or cylinder is also treated as a programming object and knows how to request an appropriate mesh density in its vicinity and when given a Cartesian mesh of the appropriate density knows how to replace that Cartesian mesh with a high-quality multi-block body-fitted mesh that satisfies the mesh density requirements specified on that object. The mesher is fully automated in the sense that no user input except geometry definition and mesh density specification is required. The mesher calculates all blocking and node distribution. Since the set of objects is fairly small, parametric multi-block meshes can be designed for each object. These parametric meshes are pre-programmed and have the quality characteristics of a hand-designed body-fitted multi-block mesh. While the mesh around each object is initially multi-block, parts of the mesh around each object are latter modified when “children” create meshes around themselves. The final mesh is characterized by a large number of regions which are structured. ICEM AutoHexa runs very quickly, meshes of 800,000 elements have been created in 20 minutes on a typical workstation. ICEM AutoHexa is currently being used as the mesher for the IcePak product, a joint venture of ICEM CFD Engineering and Fluid Dynamics International. IcePak is a complete modeling, simulation, and visualization system for the cooling of electronic enclosures.