Volume Shrink Wrap Meshing

Produce an all-hexa or all-tetra mesh based on the selected elements or geometry, then use the shrink wrap functionality as a quick mechanism to generate solid meshes.

Note: When generating such a mesh, the Jacobian value has a large effect on the coarseness of the resulting volume mesh, as described below.

Using the shrink wrap mesh to achieve improved FE output from OptiStruct topology runs has also provided very good results which allow for quick tetra-meshing and, therefore, quick re-analysis after the optimization run.

Comparison of Altering the Jacobian Value for Solid Mesh Generation

Within both tight and loose wrap algorithm’s there is an option to generate solid mesh. This will generate an all hexa mesh on completion of the shrink wrap. When the generate solid mesh checkbox is selected it will expose a minimum jacobian input, this option essentially will hexa mesh the part with this element quality criteria defined, it controls the hexa quality which is directly linked to the adherence to the topological features of the original component. The jacobian value must be between 0 and 1. The nearer the value is to 1 the cruder the output will appear, the mesh will be more heavily voxelised. When the value is closer to 0, you are allowing the shrink wrap solid mesh algorithm to smooth and adhere to more features while maintaining the solid mesh minimum jacobian element quality. By default the minimum jacobian value is 0.3.

Figure 1. 2mm Solid Mesh, Jacobian=1.0	Figure 2. 2mm Solid Mesh, Jacobian=0.3