Tet mesh from Abaqus Surface Mesh

[Paul Kern]

Hey all,

I've been working to reconstruct microstructures with Dream.3D and really love all of the features. One of the new materials I'm working with has smaller precipitate phases that are really expensive to simulate if I use a rasterized mesh. I know that Dream.3D supports writing out surface meshes to Abaqus, but I've had no luck getting a volumetric mesh using these smoothed surface meshes. Has anyone used this to good effect for material simulation? If you needed any other meshing softwares to do it, what did you use?

Thanks everyone! 

[Sean Donegan]

Hi Paul,

I know some people have had success using the Matlab code iso2mesh, which is designed to create a tetrahedral volume mesh from a set of isosurfaces (the surface mesh you can get easily within DREAM.3D).  That may be a reasonable place to start.  I've also found this webpage helpful in the past for exploring some of the available options around for creating solid unstructured meshes.  Some of the packages listed there are out of date, but others are under active development.

hope that helps,

-Sean

[Paul Kern]

Okay. I had looked into iso2mesh but didn't have good luck with it generating tets that Abaqus would accept to be good quality for simulation. I'm currently working on creating an interface between Dream.3D and GMSH. I may be able to share this as a possible plugin for Dream.3D if there would be interest.