CSAR Noon Seminar
Phil Alexander, UIUC/CSAR
DATE: Wednesday, April 13, 2005
TIME: 12:00 Noon
PLACE: 2240 DCL
1304 W. Springfield Ave., Urbana, IL
TITLE: Parallel Surface and Volume Mesh Smoothing
ABSTRACT
During the simulation of multiphysics rocket models, deformation and
burn back of the solid propellant conspire to reduce mesh quality.
This degradation, in turn, requires ever shorter time steps in the
explicit solvers. Worse yet, eventual element inversion can result in
failure of the simulation. Mesh smoothing, local mesh repair, and
global meshing are mesh optimization techniques that can be applied to
combat mesh quality degradation. This talk will focus on
Rocmop, a mesh smoothing tool that provides parallel
topology-preserving mesh optimization.
Rocmop uses the medial quadric to smooth surface meshes while
preserving surface features. This technique is based on the
face-offsetting method developed at CSAR for accurately propagating
surface meshes. As the medial quadric is local in nature,
Rocmop's surface smoothing implementation is natively parallel.
Volume smoothing, on the other hand, is performed through a combination
of an existing serial mesh optimization core and simple parallel
coupling techniques. The serial code used is MESQUITE, the Mesh
Quality Improvement Toolkit developed through the joint efforts of
Sandia and Argonne National Laboratories. We present the
implementation of Rocmop, an introduction to its API, and some
experimental results.