Mesh refinement

I could use some additional help with mesh refinement. I would actually like to smooth the mesh elements that have been refined, or limit the smoothing to the area of the refinement, but it seems that with the smooth function enabled, it smooths the mesh in the entire model. Can smoothing the mesh be limited somehow? I have regions of my mesh that cannot be modified, because of some periodic boundary constraints.

Correct. The smoother used as part of the refinement command does smooth the entire volume that was refined, not just local to the refined region. However, you can do what you want to do using groups. Here is an example:

reset
bri x 10
mesh vol all
group ‘before_elems’ add hex all
refine curve 1 no_smooth
group ‘after_elems’ add hex all
group ‘after_elems’ remove hex in before_elems

group ‘smooth_faces’ add face in hex in after_elems smooth face in smooth_faces

smooth hex in after_elems scheme laplacian smooth hex in after_elems scheme mean