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Title: Final Report for LDRD Project on Rapid Problem Setup for Mesh-Based Simulation (Rapsodi)

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/15003249· OSTI ID:15003249

Under LLNL Exploratory Research LDRD funding, the Rapsodi project developed rapid setup technology for computational physics and engineering problems that require computational representations of complex geometry. Many simulation projects at LLNL involve the solution of partial differential equations in complex 3-D geometries. A significant bottleneck in carrying out these simulations arises in converting some specification of a geometry, such as a computer-aided design (CAD) drawing to a computationally appropriate 3-D mesh that can be used for simulation and analysis. Even using state-of-the-art mesh generation software, this problem setup step typically has required weeks or months, which is often much longer than required to carry out the computational simulation itself. The Rapsodi project built computational tools and designed algorithms that help to significantly reduce this setup time to less than a day for many realistic problems. The project targeted rapid setup technology for computational physics and engineering problems that use mixed-element unstructured meshes, overset meshes or Cartesian-embedded boundary (EB) meshes to represent complex geometry. It also built tools that aid in constructing computational representations of geometry for problems that do not require a mesh. While completely automatic mesh generation is extremely difficult, the amount of manual labor required can be significantly reduced. By developing novel, automated, component-based mesh construction procedures and automated CAD geometry repair and cleanup tools, Rapsodi has significantly reduced the amount of hand crafting required to generate geometry and meshes for scientific simulation codes.

Research Organization:
Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
US Department of Energy (US)
DOE Contract Number:
W-7405-ENG-48
OSTI ID:
15003249
Report Number(s):
UCRL-ID-151735; TRN: US200422%%39
Resource Relation:
Other Information: PBD: 7 Feb 2003
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English