Tetrahedralization from surface mesh of thin-walled object

Question

I need to generate a tetrahedral (volume) mesh of thin-walled object object. Think of objects like a bottle or a plastic bowl, etc, which are mostly hollow. The volumetric mesh is needed for an FEM simulation. A surface mesh of the outside surface of the object is available from measurement, using e.g. octomap or KinectFusion. Therefore the vertex spacing is relatively regular. The inner surface of the object can be calculated from the outside surface by moving all points inside, since the wall thickness is known.

So far, I have considered the following approaches:

Create a 3D Delaunay triangulation (which would destroy the existing surface meshes) and then remove all tetrahedra which are not between the two original surfaces. For this check, it might be required to create an implicit surface representation of the 2 surfaces.
Create a 3D Delaunay triangulation and remove tetrahedra which are "inside" (in the hollow space) or "outside" (of the outer surface) with Alphashapes.
Close the outside and inside meshes and load them into tetgen as the outside hull and as a hole respectively.

These approaches seem to be a bit inelegant to me, and they still have some pitfalls. I would probably need several libraries/tools for them. For 1 and 2, probably tetgen or another FEM meshing tool would still be required to create well-conditioned tetrahedra. Does anyone have a more straight-forward solution? I guess this should also be a common problem in 3D printing.

Concerning tools/libraries, I have looked into PCL, meshlab and tetgen so far. They all seem to do only part of the job. Ideally, I would like to use only open source libraries and avoid tools which require manual intervention.

why don't you use shell elements? – agentp Apr 10 '14 at 19:43 — agentp, Apr 10 '14 at 19:43

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 06 '14 at 08:45

0

One way is to:

create triangular mesh of surface points,
extrude (move) that surface to inner for a given thickness. That produces volume (triangular prism) mesh of a wall,
each prism can be split in three tetrahedrons.

answered Apr 06 '14 at 08:45

Ante

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Same as OP's approach #3. – Camille Goudeseune May 19 '14 at 17:16
@CamilleGoudeseune Both methods produce similar result, but this method avoid general tetgen meshing since prisms are split is 'static' way. – Ante May 19 '14 at 19:00

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 28 '14 at 15:15

The problem I see is aspect ratio.

A single layer of tetrahedra will not reproduce shell or bending behavior very well. A single element through the thickness will already require a large mesh. Putting more than one will likely break the bank in order to keep aspect ratios and angles acceptable.

I'd prefer brick or thick shell elements to tetrahedra in this case. I think the modeling will be easier and the behavior will be more faithful to the physics.

Tetrahedralization from surface mesh of thin-walled object

2 Answers2