Efficient tetrahedral remeshing of feature models for finite element analysis

Finite element analysis is nowadays widely used for product testing. At various moments during the design phase, aspects of the physical behaviour of the product are simulated by performing an analysis of the model. For each analysis, a mesh needs to be created that represents the geometry of the model at that point. In particular during the later stages of the development cycle, often only minor modifications are made to a model between design iterations. In that case it can be beneficial to reuse part of the previous mesh, especially if it was costly to construct. A new method is presented that efficiently constructs a tetrahedral mesh based on a tetrahedral mesh of a feature model at an earlier point of the design cycle. This is done by analysing the difference of the two feature models from the point of view of the individual features. By this means we can find a natural correspondence between the geometries of the feature models, and relate this to the mesh of the earlier model. We discuss the algorithm, gained improvements, quality of the results, and conditions for this method to be effective.