11.1 Mapped meshing performance

Product: Abaqus/CAE

Benefits: The speed of the mapped meshing process is greatly improved over previous Abaqus releases. As a result, mapped meshing is now allowed by default for suitable model geometry.

Description: When you mesh a shell region using free meshing with triangular elements or with quadrilateral elements and the advancing front algorithm, Abaqus/CAE can substitute mapped meshing to improve the surface mesh quality for four-sided regions. Mapped meshing can also be used for:

tetrahedral meshing of solids where the boundary surfaces are meshed with triangular elements
hexahedral meshing of solids using the swept meshing technique if the source face is meshed with quadrilateral elements using the advancing front algorithm

In past releases of Abaqus, mapped meshing could be time consuming, especially for models that had many suitable regions. The surface meshing algorithms have been refined such that the mapped meshing process now approaches and, in some cases, may be faster than the time required to complete a surface mesh for the same model without mapped meshing. Table 11–1 shows the improvement in speed between the previous Abaqus release and the current release for models where mapped meshing was allowed.

Table 11–1 Performance improvements in surface meshing operations that utilize the mapped meshing technique.

Part	Number of faces	Abaqus 6.9 (sec)	Abaqus 6.9-EF (sec)	Speed-up ratio
Engine block 1	3994	57.3	23.5	2.4×
Engine block 2	7754	167.3	51.7	3.2×
Engine block 3	11696	438.4	59.8	7.3×
Engine block 4	14733	918.0	100.0	9.2×
Ship hull	14714	1842.0	48.0	38×

The time shown in the table is the time required to complete the triangular surface mesh.

To prevent Abaqus/CAE from evaluating suitable regions for mapped meshing, toggle off Use mapped meshing where appropriate in the Mesh Controls dialog box.

Abaqus/CAE Usage:

Mesh module:
    MeshControls: toggle Use mapped meshing where appropriate to allow or 
   prevent mapped meshing for the selected region

References:

Abaqus/CAE User's Manual