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