Abstract:

Abstract： Meshing, which is very important to the result of finite element analysis (FEA), is often conducted  manually. It takes a long time while the geometry model has to be re-meshed every time if the design is changed. A new method was presented in this paper that helped to reuse FEA meshes to improve efficiency with an extended technology of free-form deformation (FFD). This method generalized the previous FFD by allowing local deformation based on trivariate Bspline and proposing a way to control vertexes of the FFD lattice. A three-level framework was presented that was “geometry feature-FFD lattice vertexesFEA nodes” to realize the reuse of FEA meshes with preserving geometry features continuous to the 2nd derivative and parameterizing mesh models. This approach saved time to re-mesh when the design variables change within a relatively narrow range. The result of a case study of helical gear shaft at the end of this paper shows that this method is able to apply deformation on the FEA meshes directly, keeping topology structures and geometry features stable instead of re-meshing from computer-aided design models.

Key words: free-form deformation, reuse of finite element analysis (FEA) meshes, geometry feature, trivariate B-spline volume