Automatic generation of quadrilateral multi-block topology for FEA/CFD applications

Mesh generation is essential in many engineering analysis applications. It is well known that the use of hexahedral meshes will result in higher analysis accuracy while requiring less computational resources. Unfortunately, the near-automatic mesh generation tools that are offered in current commercial software packages can only produce tetrahedral meshes. The generation of high quality hexahedral meshes requires tremendous amount of tedious human interaction, which adversely hampers user productivity. We believe that a knowledge-based engineering approach, which relies on rules obtained from experts, can be used to automatically generate hexahedral meshes. This paper establishes the feasibility by automating the process of generating surface meshes (quadrilateral). A software tool was developed, which imports part geometry from AutoCAD. At a few mouse clicks, it automatically generates a multi-block topology. The topology is exported into GridPro az3000 (a commercial meshing software tool) using TIL (topology input language) format, which is then used to generate the final mesh. 1 1