Anisotropic hex mesh refinement

[ali_geo]

Dear Cubit community,

I am using Coreform-Cubit 2025.8 on Windows. I have three bricks in my geometry, and one of them (the middle one) is very thin. I want to refine two parts of my mesh, but the issue is that the refinement density in the z direction is much higher than in the x and y directions. Is there any way to make the refinement pattern anisotropic? I want to have a higher density of refinement in the x and y directions because in the z direction I already have a high density of nodes. My mesh (after the refinement) looks like this:

And here is the script to reproduce the mesh:

#!cubit
reset
brick x 3000 y 3000 z 500
move Volume 1 z -750 include_merged
webcut volume 1 with plane zplane offset -800
webcut volume 2 with plane zplane offset -820

imprint vol all
merge vol all
volume all size auto factor 5
mesh vol all
refine hex 990 969 numsplit 2 bias 1.0 depth 1

mesh vertex all

I very much appreciate any help.

Cheers

Ali

[pmarty]

Hey @ali_geo,

I wonder if an approach here could be to first mesh the surface, refine that, and then sweep it in the depth direction. Here’s an example of what I mean:

#!cubit
reset
brick x 3000 y 3000 z 500
move Volume 1 z -750 include_merged
webcut volume 1 with plane zplane offset -800
webcut volume 2 with plane zplane offset -820

imprint vol all
merge vol all

# Mesh the top surface
surface 1 size 135
surface 1 scheme map
mesh surface 1

# Refine it in the corners
refine face 1 463  numsplit 2 bias 1.0 depth 1 smooth

# Sweep in the depth direction
volume all size 135
volume all redistribute nodes on 
volume all scheme Sweep Vector 0 0 -1 sweep transform translate propagate bias  
volume all autosmooth target off 
mesh volume 1
mesh volume 2
mesh volume 3

Here’s the resulting hex mesh:

Cheers,
Pat