CSE/CSAR Seminar

Prof. Mark Shephard, Director
Scientific Computation Research Center
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

DATE: Tuesday, July 27, 2004

TIME: 10:00 A.M.

PLACE: 2240 DCL

TITLE: Mesh Modification for General Adaptive Mesh Control

ABSTRACT

The application of adaptive finite element techniques requires the ability to alter the size, order and shape of the elements of a given mesh as dictated by error indicators. In general, an anisotropic mesh-size field specified throughout the domain should be used to represent the desired element size and shape. This presentation will overview a set of methodologies and associated software components capable of supporting a full range of simplex-based mesh adaptation needs for general 3-D domains. The use of the mesh modification for the adaptive analysis of three applications will be given. Technical areas to be covered include

Use of topological structures to support general mesh and 3-D domain representations and in maintaining required relationships of the mesh to the geometric model.
Procedures to account for model update during simulations with evolving geometry.
Mesh modification operations to support general mesh adaptation.
Ability to support mesh modification on distributed memory parallel computers.
Incremental solution parameter update during mesh modification.
Mesh modification to match adaptively defined anisotropic mesh-size fields.
Creating geometrically graded curved meshes needed for high order methods.

Adaptive analysis applications to be demonstrated include

Viscous flow problems discretized using stabilized finite elements.
Blast problems discretized by a discontinuous Galerkin method.
Simulations of large deformation bulk forming using a commercial finite element solver.

BIOGRAPHY

Professor Shephard is the Samuel A. and Elisabeth C. Johnson, Jr. Professor of Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. At RPI Dr. Shephard holds joint appointments in the departments of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering; Civil and Environmental Engineering; and Computer Science. He is also the director of Rensselaer's Scientific Computation Research Center. Dr. Shephard has published over 225 papers related to his development of computational mechanics techniques. He is a Fellow in and the past President of the US Association for Computational Mechanics, a Fellow and member of the General Council of the International Association for Computational Mechanics, a Fellow of ASME, an Associate Fellow of AIAA, and a member of ASEE, ASCE and the American Academy of Mechanics. He is on the editorial board of four computational mechanics journals and editor of Engineering with Computers.