Recognition and decomposition of bosses on CAD models for hexahedral meshes generation in CAE analysis

Solid meshes are used in finite element analysis to represent the object geometry for simulation and analysis. Hexahedral and prism meshes are inherently more preferable to tetrahedral meshes, but are difficult to generate automatically. The purpose of this study was to develop an approach for meshing using feature recognition to decompose the target feature. Particularly, a boss recognition algorithm was proposed and the data for automatic meshing was established. A detailed description of the proposed algorithm was described, and several examples were presented to illustrate its feasibility.