Volume Meshing

Volume meshes are widely used for mechanical, fluid, thermal, electrical, and other simulations.

The volume meshing features in VGSTUDIO MAX: 

• Are an easy-to-use tool to create accurate and high-quality tetrahedral volume meshes directly from CT scans for use in third-party FEM simulation software.
• Are based on the sub-voxel accurate, locally adaptive surface determination in VGSTUDIO MAX.*
• Use algorithms that work directly on the volumetric data of the CT scan without creating an intermediate surface mesh, thus maintaining maximum geometrical accuracy.
• Work on scans of mono-material and multi-material components or material probes.

*Requires the Coordinate Measurement Module 

You can control and improve the finite element (FE) mesh quality according to specific element quality requirements by setting target parameters for mesh optimization.

Choose from one or more of the following criteria: 

• max./min. element size,
• edge aspect,
• edge/height aspect,
• collapse,
• stretch,
• shape factor,
• smallest face corner angle,
• largest face corner angle,
• and min. edge size.

Histograms for each quality criterion and the ability to visualize the criterions in the mesh allow you to clearly review and assess the mesh quality.

For increased accuracy of the simulation results, you can locally refine meshes in specified regions while limiting the number of created elements. The familiar ROI tools in VGSTUDIO MAX ensure an efficient workflow.

Meshing thin parts of a volume is now more accurate than ever. By specifying the number of tetrahedral elements, you can greatly enhance mesh fidelity.

To prepare the efficient application of various boundary conditions, e.g., loads, fixations or contacts, in third-party FEM software, the volume meshing features in VGSTUDIO MAX allow you to define and export sets of tetrahedral elements, nodes, or facets based on specified regions of interests (ROIs). The created mesh will respect the outline of the ROIs. Defining FE entity sets on the CT data in VGSTUDIO MAX reduces a possible loss of geometrical information and ensures a high degree of geometrical accuracy after exporting it to third-party FEM simulation software.

The volume meshing features in VGSTUDIO MAX enable you to efficiently identify, visualize, and remove unconnected element sets to create a clean FE mesh without loose particles.

Create tetrahedral volume meshes for components containing sharp edges to get a better representation of component geometry with a significantly reduced number of tetrahedral elements. When activating this option, the algorithm identifies sharp edges in the component and creates a mesh that reflects these edges by aligning FE nodes on them.

The tetrahedral mesh can be exported for FE simulations using TET4 linear or TET10 quadratic elements in Abaqus (.inp), Patran (.pat) and Nastran (.bdf) formats.

Safran, an international high-technology group and tier-1 supplier of systems and equipment in the Aerospace and Defense markets, benchmarked volume meshing solutions from different vendors to find out that the Volume Meshing Module for VGSTUDIO MAX 3.4.4 offered the best results among the investigated methods. The company has explicitly examined volume meshing of computed tomography (CT) data as part of a PhD thesis.