Generating meshes for finite-difference analysis using a solid modeler
One tool used by the Engineering Research Division of LLNL to help analyze the behavior of electronic systems in hostile environments is 3D finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) computation. FDTD codes solve Maxwell's equations,the differential equations of electromagnetism, on a uniform lattice of points. It is this uniform lattice, or ''mesh,'' that distinguishes finite-difference codes from other codes. The simple mesh makes FDTD codes computationally more efficient than other codes, which enables them to run larger problems and to run faster (up to thirty times faster than finite-element codes, for example). Therefore, within the Engineering Department at LLNL, Electronics Engineering (EE) has initiated a project to develop a mesh generator that will provide meshes suitable for FDTD analysis. This report describes the results of the first year of EE's FDTD Mesh Generation Project. During this year a preliminary version of an automated mesh generator was built and used to create a mesh of an object of interest to the High-Power Microwave Program, namely an electrically detonatable land mine. The code was verified by meshing basic solids such as spheres and cylinders. Because of the design of the code, there is no software limitation to the size of meshes that can be accommodated. The algorithm with a mesh space of approximately 500,000 cells has been demonstrated. The mesh generator can detect certain objects with walls that are thinner than the width of a cell. The code has internal graphics for viewing objects as they appear prior to being converted to a finite-difference representation. Additionally, via data files, the code is coupled to two external graphics packages for visually checking the meshes, namely TAURUS on the Cray and a new code, IMAGE, on the Silicon Graphics IRIS workstation.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Livermore National Lab., CA (USA)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-48
- OSTI ID:
- 5996761
- Report Number(s):
- UCID-21189; ON: DE88001458
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
TAURUS: an interactive post-processor for the analysis codes NIKE3D, DYNA3D, TACO3D, and GEMINI
TAURUS: an interactive post-processor for the analysis codes NIKE3D, DYNA3D, TACO3D, and GEMINI. Revision 1