Detection of intersecting Meshes

Context
Interesecting meshes cause unrealistic behaviour and reduce significantly the informative value of the calculated simulation results. Penetrations occur because of e.g.
- missing contact definitions,
- bad parametrizations,
- uncarefully manipulated input models,
- numerical inaccurencies,
- too coarse mesh size
Challenge
- It is impossible to check manually millions of elements over the simulation time for intersecting meshes.
- Furthermore some penetrations are too small so that you can hardly identify them.
- The algorithmic identification of intersecting meshes is challenging because it depends on the geometric representation of the model. The calculation differs for surface models, volume models, structural models. A finite element model is a mix of all those models.
- It is a costly procedure to perform algorithmically a full penetration check. The complexity scales quadratically with the model size for each time step.
Approach
The aim is to detect intersecting meshes in affordable time by
- using ray tracing
- within our heavily optimised distance calculation framework
- applying it only in qualified regions
- and accelerating it by utilizing GPU, parallelisation, chunking and dynamic programming