Automatic hexahedral-dominant meshing for decomposed geometries of complex components

An equivalent non-manifold cellular model is used to enrich manifold decompositions of a CAD model to create a model suitable for finite element analysis. Thin-sheet and long-slender decomposition tools are integrated around the common data structure in order to automatically define a meshing recipe based on analysis attributes identified during the decomposition. Virtual topology operations are used to replicate the hard geometry splits in the non-manifold representation and create a robust bi-directional mapping between manifold and non-manifold representations. Adjacency information extracted from the non-manifold cellular model, alongside the appropriate analysis attributes and linear integer programming methods, are used to define a hex-dominant meshing recipe, which can then be applied to automatically generate a mesh.