The sailboat BAP Union docked in Baltimore's inner bay.
During the week of March 5, 2024, the International Meshing Roundtable (International Meshing Roundtable) hosted by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) was held in Baltimore. Last year the same conference was held in Amsterdam, Netherlands. In the past year, the international industrial software industry has undergone two great changes. In mid-January 2024, Synopsis, one of the leaders in chip design software EDA, spent US$35 billion to acquire the simulation software giant Ansys; on March 5th, Cadence, another EDA leader, announced that it had spent US$1.24 billion to acquire BETA CAE, a newcomer in the simulation field. BETA CAE originated from Aristotle University in Greece and was founded in 1999 by a team of four teachers and students. Its grid generation software ANSA has many unique technical features. Different from other finite element pre-processing software, ANSA has good speed and quality in processing geometric models and finite element meshes, is highly adaptable and customizable, and has no software limitations on model scale. These two sky-high price acquisitions shocked the international industrial software industry and proved the vitality of this field! The participants also discussed enthusiastically with high spirits. On March 5th, the author gave a two-hour report at the conference, titled "Differential Geometry Applied to Mesh Generation". In the report, the author showed a project completed for BETA CAE in cooperation with Tom Hughes, the father of American computational mechanics: the world's first use of isogeometric analysis method to conduct a collision simulation experiment on the white body of a car. As we all know, car collision simulation is the king of numerical simulation. The isogeometric analysis method uses the spline function space of geometric modeling as the function space of the physical field. Isogeometric analysis has many advantages compared with the traditional finite element method, such as eliminating geometric approximation errors; reducing the number of patches with the same accuracy, thus improving calculation efficiency; improving calculation accuracy with the same number of patches, etc. However, traditional CAD models contain a large number of clipping splines, which lack watertightness and cannot be directly used for isogeometric analysis. Therefore, we need to recalculate the structured quadrilateral meshing of the original CAD model, and then establish a globally geometrically smooth and watertight spline surface. The overall quadrilateral mesh theory of curved surfaces is one of the focuses of the author's speech. The audience showed great enthusiasm and asked many insightful questions.
Figure 1. Numerical simulation experiment of automobile white-body collision. (With Tom Hughes, Kendrick Shepherd, BETA-CAE).
A brief historical review
Machine-translated from the Chinese original 2024国际网格生成圆桌会议短课程摘要：网格生成的微分几何理论基础 (published 2024-03-27). WeChat original ↗