Abstract
A fully automatic three-dimensional mesh generation method is developed by modifying the well-known ray casting technique. The method is capable of meshing objects modeled using the CSG representation scheme.
The input to the method consists of solid geometry information, and mesh attributes such as element size. The method starts by casting rays in 3D space to classify the empty and full parts of the solid. This information is then used to create a cell structure that closely models the solid object. The next step is to further process the cell structure to make it more succinct, so that the cells close to the boundary of the solid object can model the topology with enough fidelity. Moreover, neighborhood relations between cells in the structure are developed and implemented. These relations help produce better conforming meshes. Each cell in the cell structure is identified with respect to a set of pre-defined types of cells. After the identification process, a normalization process is developed and applied to the cell structure in order to ensure that the finite elements generated from each cell conform to each other and to other elements produced from neighboring cells. The last step is to mesh each cell in the structure with valid finite elements.
New three-dimensional finite elements with embedded strong discontinuities to model solids at failure
