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.