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Efficiently Mesh Your Model Geometry With Meshing Sequences

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24 views7 pages

Efficiently Mesh Your Model Geometry With Meshing Sequences

Uploaded by

Tushar Hebbar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Efficiently Mesh Your Model Geometry with Meshing

Sequences

A note on meshing.

Choosing an Accurate and Efficient Mesh


The mesh that you choose for your COMSOL Multiphysics simulation strongly affects your
modeling requirements. In fact, meshing is one of the most memory-intensive steps when it
comes to setting up and solving a finite element problem.
Identifying the mesh best-suited for your particular model often involves choosing the
correct element types and sizes. In COMSOL Multiphysics, meshing utilizes four different
element types: tetrahedra (tets), hexahedra (bricks), triangular prisms (prisms), and
pyramids. There are also nine preset element size settings, which range from Extremely fine
to Extremely coarse.

Images of different element types. From left to right: a tetrahedron, hexahedron, triangular
prism, and pyramid.

Meshing, like many of the tools available in COMSOL Multiphysics, is customizable and
interactive. In just a few steps, you can easily mesh individual faces or domains. Further, the
default physics-controlled meshing sequences create meshes that consist of different
element types and size features, which you can use as a starting point to add, move, disable,
and delete meshing operations. Each meshing operation is built in the order it appears in
the meshing sequence to produce the final mesh. Customizing the meshing sequence can
help reduce memory requirements by controlling the number, type, and quality of
elements, thereby creating an efficient and accurate simulation.

Customizing Your Meshing Sequence in COMSOL Multiphysics®


Let’s say that you want to model an electronic component that is mounted on a circuit
board by solder joints. Such a device may generate high temperatures when turned on for
extended periods of time. As noted in a previous blog post, overheating can damage the
device itself and may even present a fire hazard.

In the case of our tutorial model, exposure to extended periods of heat can cause creep in
the solder joints holding the electronic component in place. This may eventually result in
permanent deformation and failure of the joints. Here, we’ll examine how different meshes
can be used to study such a device.

An electronic component that is mounted on a circuit board by solder ball joints.

To begin, we’ll use the default Physics-controlled mesh, which is a simple, unstructured
tetrahedral mesh. This mesh is automatically created and adapted for the model’s physics
settings, with the element size defaulting to Normal, and the meshing sequence, consisting
of a Size and a Free Tetrahedral node, is hidden.
A default mesh on the electronic component geometry.

The resulting mesh, shown above, consists of about 45,000 elements. While this number of
elements does resolve the geometry quite well, it does so in all regions of the geometry
even where much fewer elements would be adequate to use for meshing, thus reducing
memory requirements. Let’s see how modifying the meshing sequence can reduce the
number of mesh elements…
Using Mesh Operations and Size Attributes in the Meshing Sequence
In order to reduce mesh elements, we can customize the mesh to be more detailed at the
spherical domains, which represent the joints, and coarser throughout the rest of the
geometry. To do this, we can now turn our attention to the local and global size attributes in
the meshing sequence. In the default meshing sequence, the settings of the first global
attribute feature are applied to the following Free Tetrahedral 1 node. The name global
attribute feature is given to the first Size feature node used in a sequence because it
influences all of the operations that follow it.

To achieve our goal, we add a local Size attribute, which applies to the individual solder joint
domains, to the Free Tetradhedral 1 operation. Doing so enables us to focus on the key
elements of our design. The initial mesh utilizing this method consists of approximately
28,000 elements, almost half the number of elements as the default mesh.

To further reduce the element number, we can apply a swept mesh, which notably reduces
the size of a model and its computational complexity. In our example, we modify the Free
Tetrahedral 1 operation to apply only to the domains of the solder joints. Now we want to
use the upper part of the circuit board and the electronic component as the sources for our
swept mesh. It is important to note, however, that a few of these model faces are already
meshed as they border the solder joints.

Next, we add a Free Triangular feature node to our meshing sequence. Since COMSOL
Multiphysics adds new nodes into the meshing sequence after the current feature node, the
Free Triangular 1 node becomes the current feature instead of the existing Free Tetrahedral
1 node. If desired, you can easily change this by moving the order of the nodes in the
meshing sequence. Keep in mind that doing so may cause build errors if an operation
depends on earlier operations in the sequence.
We can now once again turn our attention to the local and global size attributes in the
meshing sequence. When we created the Free Triangular 1 node, the mesher applied the
settings of the first global Size feature. We are able to add a coarser triangular mesh to the
Free Triangular 1 operation using a local size attribute. The new mesh, however, has an
almost identical appearance to the previous iteration. This is due to the fact that the mesher
had to utilize the solder joints’ preexisting mesh on the edges and the global size settings
(which are set as Normal) on the outer edges. Therefore, the local coarser mesh was only
applied to the interior of the meshed faces.

To avoid this issue, we simply need to ensure that the first global Size node is set as the
coarsest mesh in your entire geometry. Then, you can create local size feature nodes for
meshing operations that require finer meshes. After applying this technique, we utilize a
Coarser predefined mesh size for the swept mesher and continue sweeping the source mesh
throughout our remaining domains. The result is a mesh that contains around 17,000
elements.
If you would like to more precisely control the number of mesh elements, you can choose to
specify the distribution for the swept mesher yourself. When applying this approach to our
tutorial example, the mesh includes about 21,000 elements, with a higher resolution
confined to the domains important to our analysis, the solder joints.
Blog Written by @Caty Fairclough. Source: COMSOL Official
Website.____________________________________________________________________

Instructor | Bibhatsu Kuiri


Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/user/bibhatsu-kuiri/

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