A Common Geometry Interface for Mesh Generation

摘要

How to access to the CAD geometry in an accurate and efficient manner is one of the major issues of mesh generation in recent years. Traditionally, high-end CAD systems provide tools to access their geometry through APIs. However, differences among these CAD systems' APIs are quietly distinct, which increases the complexity of maintaining connections from CAD to FEA. This paper proposes a common geometry interface for mesh generation (CGIM) to solve this problem.CGIM is a wrapper of CAD systems' geometry APIs, which translates function calls into CAD systems' native calls. Furthermore, CGIM also provides its own topology entities corresponding to CAD geometry, such as vertex, edge, loop, face and so on. Some tool functions for mesh generation, such as construction of boundary representation tree (Brep Tree), discretion of CAD geometry module, and persist file object, are also contained. CGIM is designed to be extensible, thus, it is easy to build a new driver component to access to a new CAD geometry-modeling engine. The extensibility features of CGIM are demonstrated by implementing the Adopt-Smart~? mesh generation toolkit on top of CGIM. Ports of CGIM to Autodesk~? Mechanical Desktop~? and SolidWorks~? are underway.