Short Courses

Sunday, September 17, 2006
East Meeting Room A
Short Course fee: $140. This includes course material on all topics and lunch.

Steve Owen
Biography: Dr. Steve Owen is employed by Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico and is the current project lead and principal investigator for the CUBIT Geometry and Mesh Generation Toolkit. Past work has focused on facet-based geometry representations for mesh generation, unstructured quadrilateral and hexahedral algorithms, parametric surface meshing, boundary layer meshing for CFD, Delaunay methods, smoothing and topology cleanup, mesh sizing control, among others. He has extensive publication and editorial experience in the mesh generation community and maintains the Meshing Research Corner web site. Prior to Sandia, Steve worked in industry at Ansys Inc., a commercial finite element analysis company based in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, where he developed and maintained mesh generation tools for commercial use. Steve received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1999 while working for Ansys Inc. and received his Bachelors and Masters degrees from Brigham Young University in 1992. He currently serves on the graduate committee for several students at CMU and BYU.

Abstract: An Introduction to Mesh Generation Algorithms
This talk is a brief introduction to some of the fundamental algorithms used in commercial mesh generation tools. It will cover triangle, tetrahedral, quadrilateral, hexahedral as well as hex-dominant approaches. Delaunay, Advancing Front and Octree approaches will be discussed with respect to triangle and tetrahedral methods. Quad and hex methods will include mapping, submapping, sweeping, paving, q-morph, plastering, h-morph as well as an introduction to selected research oriented methods. An introduction to 3D and parametric surface meshing methods will also be provided. A classification and comparison of existing mesh generation methods will be discussed, showing strengths and weaknesses for various applications. This course is intended to be an introductory course for those new to the field or who would like a non-technical refresher course on basic mesh generation algorithms.

Mark Shephard
Biography: Mark S. Shephard is the Samuel A. and Elisabeth C. Johnson, Jr. Professor of Engineering, and the director of the Scientific Computation Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He holds joint appointments in the departments of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering; Civil and Environmental Engineering; and Computer Science. Dr. Shephard has published over 250 papers. He is a fellow 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 and an Associate Fellow of AIAA. He is the editor of Engineering with Computers and on the editorial board of six computational mechanics journals. He is a co-founder of Simmetrix Inc., a company dedicated to the technologies that enable simulation-based engineering.

Abstract: This short course lecture will consider the construction of unstructured meshes for general curved 3-D domains as needed in the execution of adaptive simulations. Consideration will be given to the technical issues associated with adaptive mesh construction for both low-order methods (h-refinement) and high-order methods (p-refinement). Specific topics covered will include:

• Mesh adaptation to an anisotropic mesh metric field based on generalized mesh modification. The procedures to be presented will support general anisotropic mesh refinement and coarsening, ensuring the proper approximation of curved domain boundaries, application of effective local transfer of solution variables during mesh refinement, and application to cases of mixed mesh topologies such as boundary layer meshes with prismatic elements in the boundary layer.
• Parallelization of mesh adaptation.
• Construction of near optimal coarse curved meshes for p-version analysis. The procedures covered will include the construction of geometrically graded meshes from singular features, constructing prismatic elements in thin sections and mesh modifications to ensure meshes can be properly curved to the domain boundary.

Timothy Tautges
Biography: Dr. Timothy J. Tautges received his PhD in Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1990. After a post-doc in Italy, he joined Sandia National Laboratories in 1992, where he performed research and development in nuclear reactor safety analysis before transferring to the CUBIT project in early 1994. He was one of the developers of the Whisker Weaving all-hexahedral meshing algorithm, and has also contributed to research in many other technologies associated with geometry and meshing. He lead the project from 1996-1998. Dr. Tautges has telecommuted from the pastoral setting of Madison, Wisconsin, since 1998, and holds an Adjunct Professor position in the Engineering Physics department at UW-Madison. At the time of this writing, Dr. Tautges remains the longest continuously-serving member of the CUBIT team.

Abstract: The integation of geometry and mesh functionality into scientific computing applications like finite element codes has become quite common in the last several years. This process is facilitated by common interfaces for geometry and mesh data, and depends heavily on leveraging geometry and mesh functionality from codes like CUBIT and packaging that functionality in component form. In this short course, I will describe common geometry and mesh interfaces developed by the Terascale Simulation Tools & Technologies (TSTT) SciDAC center. I will describe implementations of these interfaces based on the CGM and MOAB libraries, and present short applications using those interfaces. Finally, I will describe several tools which work through these interfaces developed as part of the TSTT and CUBIT projects, including mesh generation (CAMEL/CAMAL), mesh smoothing (Mesquite), and shape optimization (DDRIV).

Kenji Shimada
Biography: Kenji Shimada is Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Department of Biomedical Engineering (by courtesy) and the Robotics Institute (by courtesy). Dr. Shimada received his B.S. (1983) and M.S. (1985) from the University of Tokyo, and his Ph.D.
(1993) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests are in the areas of geometric modeling, mesh processing, computational geometry, computer graphics, and medical robotics. Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon in 1996, he was Manager of Graphics Applications at IBM Research, Tokyo Research Laboratory. Dr. Shimada received the JSAIM Best Author Award in 2006, the ASME Design Automation Best Paper Award in 2004, the IPSJ Best Paper Award in 2002, NSF CAREER Award in 2000, Honda Initiation Grant in 1998, the IPSJ Yamashita Award in 1994, and the Nicograph Best Paper Award in 1994. He is a member of ACM, ASME, ASEE, IEEE, JSIAM, SAE, and SIAM.

Abstract: This tutorial presents current trends and issues in automatic mesh generation. Although automated mesh generation methods in two and three dimensions have been studied intensively, many analysis engineers still craft meshes manually for a certain class of analysis problems. In order to realize fully automated high-quality mesh generation, two technical issues need to be addressed: (1) automated mesh generators should be able to control the anisotropy and directionality of a mesh, and (2) geometric operations required prior to mesh generation should be made more robust and automated. This tutorial outlines recent development of the two technical issues in order to encourage further research and development of advanced mesh generation technology.

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