Thin walled structures are classically computed by dimensionally reduced models. During the last few years, there has been an increasing need to model thin structures as solids with hexahedral elements. Hexahedral elements generally provide more accurate solutions than the dimensionally reduced models and are well suited e.g. for the definition of anisotropic materials or the solution of nonlinear material behaviour. For these problems a difficulty is to create conforming meshes of hexahedral elements for arbitrarily curved thin walled structures. We will present a new algorithm for generating conforming meshes of hexahedral elements on bounded three-dimensional surfaces. After first detecting all intersecting reference surfaces the geometry is manipulated such that the boundaries of the original surfaces are reshaped and referenced boundary edges are defined. On these rebounded surfaces a triangulation algorithm based on a domain subdivision approach is applied. Quadrilaterals are then formed by applying an automatic conversion algorithm. The generation of hexahedral elements is achieved by an offset mapping technique, thereby allowing for a varying thickness of the resulting mesh [1]. The interfaces at intersecting surfaces are formed to patches of regular hexahedral elements and conform to the boundaries of the mesh created on the manipulated surfaces geometries achieved in the first step.The principal contribution is a new meshing technique able to automatically generate conforming hexahedral elements directly from dimensionally reduced, arbitrarily curved thin walled structures without the necessity to model complex thin but solid structures in detail with a CAD tool. The proposed method also offers the advantage of avoiding expensive intersection and projection calculations commonly associated with hexahedral element generation.     «

Thin walled structures are classically computed by dimensionally reduced models. During the last few years, there has been an increasing need to model thin structures as solids with hexahedral elements. Hexahedral elements generally provide more accurate solutions than the dimensionally reduced models and are well suited e.g. for the definition of anisotropic materials or the solution of nonlinear material behaviour. For these problems a difficulty is to create conforming meshes of hexahedral el...     »