I am trying to generate the hex mesh for a given geometry (a cube with spherical insertion) using Cubit Sculpt and would like to check the planarity of generated mesh. As much I could search, there is a metric called “Warpage” available for quadrilateral meshes but nothing similar is available for Hexes. Can anyone suggest something in this regards?
Also, is there a way to avoid having non-planar faces for my mesh by playing around with some parameters?
I don’t know of a metric that specifically looks at planarity of hex faces. You would probably want to look at the shape metric as one of the metrics that would capture both skew and taper. You can find the quality metrics in Cubit under Mesh/Volume/Quality. There is a long list of different metrics you can try.
The sculpt algorithm should give planar faces internal to to the volume. At the exterior faces it will depend on the geometry. What kinds of issues are you seeing?
So basically I am generating a mesh for a mechanics problem where non-planar mesh face will create problem in solving it. The geometry, as I specified earlier, is a cube of size (100x100x100 units) with a centered spherical insertion of a different material of radius 25 units and an interface of thickness 5 units around it.
(Cut sections of geometry looks something like this)
(this is one of the mesh where non planar face is quite visible)
Problem I am encountering is, as I could see manually, few meshes seems to have a non-planer face.
Can you suggest what can be a probable approach for meshing in order to prevent this? I am looking to have a coarser mesh throughout but fine mesh near the insertion and specifically in interface region.
reset
create sphere radius 2.5 inner radius 2
brick x 10
subtract 1 from volume 2 keep
split body all
delete vol 2
compress
vol 3 name 'inner_sphere'
vol 1 name 'outer_sphere'
vol 2 name 'bounding_box'
webcut volume all with plane xplane offset 0
webcut volume all with plane yplane offset 0
webcut volume all with plane zplane offset 0
imprint all
merge all
curve 39 119 int 3
vol with name "bounding_box*" scheme poly
mesh vol with name "bounding_box*"
volume in vertex 84 scheme tetprimitive
mesh vol all
The suggestions given by you looks good for this particular case with a single particle inclusion, sorry I didn’t mentioned earlier but I will be moving to a multiple randomly distributed varied size inclusion problem in advanced stage where this meshing approach might not work that well, as much I could understand. This is why I am more considering Sculpt as an option .
I kind of assumed you had a reason for using sculpt, but I wanted to make sure.
Sculpt works by creating a cartesian grid and immersing the desired geometry into that grid. It will map faces from the cartesian grid onto the surfaces. With a sphere this will create a non-planar face for nearly every face on the surface of a sphere.
If you want to look at quadrilateral planarity, one way might be to create the faces on the surfaces of he spheres and then look at the quadrilateral warpage metric.
Sculpt will create mesh blocks for every volume. It only creates the hexes and no quadrilateral elements. The command skin hex in block 1 will create faces on the surface of block 1.
You can then use the GUI Mesh/Quad/Quality page and select Warpage to get a metric that correlates to planarity. Interior smoothing may impact surface planarity, but it should be minimal.
