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by Eric Miller
In the era of automatic tetrahedral meshing, many have lost their way. Wondering analysts
simply read in their geometry, specify a few sizing controls, hit a mesh button and get a
mesh. But in the end, they receive a mesh that is not ideal, especially on the surface. What
these meandering meshers need is a map… a mapped mesh.
OK, that is a pretty lame introduction, but I’ve run out of Monty Python references and I don’t
have Doug’s B movie knowledge.
Bad intro aside, many users are not aware of the strong capabilities available in Workbench
meshing for creating really nice mapped meshes on surfaces. Once created, these mapped
meshes can be used to mesh 2D and shell models as well as to extrude a mesh (sweep
method) for a 3D Hex mesh or a ‘seed’ mesh for a tetrahedral mesh (patch conforming
algorithm). By using a controlled mapped mesh, users can ‘find’ their way to a better mesh.
Note that the last topology did not map mesh. We will come back to that. But the other five all
meshed with a nice looking mapped mesh. So how does ANSYS figure out how to do this?
What they do is take geometry and break it up into 4 sided chunks. They call this making
Submaps. But to do this they need to identify the outside edges in terms of squarish topology.
The secret to doing this is identifying the vertices (points where edges connect) as either a
corner, a side or an edge. Figure 3 (stolen from the user manual) shows an example of each:
Figure 3: Vertex Types
The algorithm identifies the vertex type by looking at the inside (mesh side) angle formed by
the two edges attached to the vertex using based on the following table:
End 0°-135° 1
Side 136°-224° 2
Corner 225°-314° 3
You can get a feel for the algorithm (but not the actual one, it is much more complex) by
stepping through breaking up the geometry in Figure 3 and follow the following steps in your
head:
1. Mesh the edges creating nodes on the edges based on local and global meshing settings
2. March around the edges making virtual edges that combine by combining any edges linked by
Side vertices (the only one is F-G-A in this example).
3. Go to the first corner you encountered. Shoot a line along the vector from B-C until you
intersect with an edge. Find F-E.
4. Count number of nodes from A-B, call it N. Then count N nodes from F toward E and make the
Nth node a virtual vertex H.
5. Draw a virtual edge from C-H. Note, B-C-H is now one virtual edge because in B-C-H, C is
now a Side vertex.
6. Keep marching around from H till you get back to A. You end up with 4 corners so now you
have a sub map.
7. Go back to where you broke off, C, and march around to C (remember H-C is now an edge
and C looks like an End in this topology) until you get another corner. You now have the
second sub map.
Pretty cool, huh. I wish I would have thought of that. The actual method is of course much
more complex and has allsorts of checks and “if this, than do that” stuff in it.
You basically click on the cell for Sides, Corners and Ends and then identify the vertices for
each. The last example in figure three has rounded corners so the algorithm identifies the
vertices on the rounds as Sides because they are 180° apart. The result is the free mesh
shown in Figure 5. If you want a mapped mesh, you need to specify the vertices on the
rounds. Figure 6 shows the result. Well, maybe sometimes the free mesh is better.
Figure 5: Resulting Free Mesh with Automatic Identification of Vertices
Conclusions
In most cases, just putting a Mapped Face Meshing control on a surface will give you a nice
mapped mesh. The mapped mesh is usually more uniform, has less distorted elements, no
triangles, and usually has less nodes. But a mapped mesh is not always better, you need to
use your engineering judgment to decide which is best in each application. I like to use this
control on fillets and on blocky parts.
So, when you are not liking the look of the default surface mesh, even if you are not hex
meshing your model, turn off the autopilot, and try a Mapped Face Meshing control