A typical task of an engineer – be it in civil, mechanical, aeronautical engineering and many other fields – is to design and develop new objects, which fulfill certain physical requirements, generally described by partial differential equations, e.g. for structural problems, heat transfer, fluid dynamics, etc. The realization of an optimal design naturally requires an iteration between geometric design, typically carried out by Computer Aided Design and numerical simulations, such as the Finite Element Method. Unfortunately, CAD models are not directly compatible with a numerical simulation, and thus need to be translated into a simulation suitable format, e.g. a mesh. This transition process is considered to be the bottleneck in the design process and has initiated the development of several new simulation techniques, which allow working directly on the CAD model. The most prominent approach is Isogeometric Analysis which relies on the idea of using the same type of functions for the description of the geometry and for the numerical approximation. Whereas IGA is best suited for dimensionally reduced models, such as shells, immersed boundary- or fictitious domain methods fit better to general solids, particularly those which are described by Boundary Representation or by Constructive Solid Geometry.     «

A typical task of an engineer – be it in civil, mechanical, aeronautical engineering and many other fields – is to design and develop new objects, which fulfill certain physical requirements, generally described by partial differential equations, e.g. for structural problems, heat transfer, fluid dynamics, etc. The realization of an optimal design naturally requires an iteration between geometric design, typically carried out by Computer Aided Design and numerical simulations, such as the Finite...     »