Abstract

Many of the engineering problems are analyzed using numerical methods such as the finite element (FEM) whose results provide a basis to make basic decisions regarding the design of many important works. accepted It is generally that FEM computations are reliable; however, the results may be affected by the definition of the finite element mesh, this is particularly true when the internal and external boundaries are time dependent, as is the case of soil consolidation. Accordingly, a thorough investigation was carried out with the main purpose of eliminating this inconvenience. The main steps to carried out the development of the innovative geometric procedure to automatically refine finite element tetrahedra-type (3D) are described. This geometric algorithm is based on the theory of fractals and is a generalization of the algorithm for triangular element finite element meshes (2D) [1, 2]. This paper presents the fundaments of this new algorithm and shows its great approximation using 3D close form solutions, and its versatility to adapt the original Finite Element Mesh when the load boundary conditions are modified (Neumann conditions).

Abstract

In this paper an automatic remeshing algorithm of triangular finite elements is presented. It is well known that the element sizes of the mesh play an important role in modeling the continuum, particularly when notable material properties differences exist in contiguous areas of the medium. In such cases, the mesh must be fine enough in such areas in order to obtain reliable results. Therefore, in this paper is advanced an algorithm to carry out automatic remeshing of local areas where the “remeshing” criteria is activated to refine the mesh accordingly. Herein the proposed algorithm integrated into a two dimensional finite element computer program is used to analyze a classical geotechnical problem to show the importance of locally refining the mesh and to demonstrate that regardless of the geometric characteristics of the initial mesh, the algorithm yields practically equal results. Computations with the proposed method are compared with the corresponding close form solutions, whenever available, to show the usefulness and reliability of the remeshing algorithm. Furthermore, to show the algorithm’s versality, the initial loading boundary conditions considered for the cases included in this paper are modified in order to show how the automatic local remeshing is capable of adapting the initial mesh configuration into a new one as a function of the new boundary conditions. As shown in the paper, the final resulting meshes for both load boundary conditions considered are appreciably dissimilar from each other, which leads to somehow different results.

Abstract