Application of Interactive Deformation to Assembled Mesh Models for CAE Analysis

Mesh deformation, which is sometimes referred to as mesh morphing in CAE, is useful for providing various shapes of meshes for CAE tools. This paper proposes a new framework for interactively and consistently deforming assembly models of sheet structure for mechanical parts. This framework is based on a surface-based deformation, which calculates the vertex positions so that the mean curvature normal is preserved at each vertex in a least squares sense. While existing surface-based deformation techniques cannot simultaneously deform assembly mesh models, our method allows us to smoothly deform disconnected meshes by propagating the rotations and translations through disconnected vertices. In addition, we extend our deformation technique to handle non-manifold conditions, because shell structure models may include non-manifold edges. We have applied our method to assembly mesh models of automobile parts. Our experimental results have shown that our method requires almost the same pre-processing time as existing methods and can deform practical assembly models interactively.