Automatic Thin Sheet Identification of Complex Model for Hexahedral Dominant Meshing

摘要

This paper describes an automatic method for identifying thin sheet regions in a complex solid model. The main purpose of thin sheet identification is to ease the current situation of hexahedral meshing for complex geometry in the aerospace industry, since swept hexahedral meshes can be easily applied to the identified thin sheet regions. A substantial reduction in degrees of freedom is achieved in the resulting thin sheet regions. The method is based on a face pairing technique, which matches bounding faces of a region satisfying the distance and overlap criteria. Edges of the paired faces are discretized and imprinted to the mid-surface. They are represented in the UV parameter space of the mid-surface, transforming the problem from 3D to 2D. This enables 2D polygon intersection algorithms to be employed to obtain the critical points that determine the boundary of the thin sheet regions. Splitting faces are then generated based on the intersection result and ultimately used to isolate the thin sheet regions.