ALE adaptive meshing and remapping in Abaqus/Standard

ALE adaptive meshing consists of two fundamental tasks:

  • creating a new mesh through a process called sweeping, and

  • remapping solution variables from the old mesh to the new mesh with a process called advection.

You can control the process of mesh sweeping after which, if necessary, Abaqus/Standard will automatically perform advection. The default methods for creating a new mesh have been chosen carefully to work for acoustic analysis and for modeling the effects of ablation, or wear, of material. However, you may need to override the default choices to balance the robustness and efficiency of adaptive meshing or to extend the use of adaptive meshing for other types of applications.

Adaptive mesh smoothing is defined as part of a step definition. The adaptive meshing in Abaqus/Standard uses an operator split method wherein each analysis increment consists of a Lagrangian phase followed by an Eulerian phase. The Lagrangian phase is the typical Abaqus/Standard solution increment where neither mesh sweeps nor advection occur. Once the equilibrium equations have converged, mesh smoothing is applied. Following the adjustment of nodes through the mesh sweeping process, material point quantities are advected in an Eulerian phase to account for the revised meshing of the model in its current configuration. This operator split method is chosen to avoid unsymmetric Jacobian terms that would result when the advection and material straining occur simultaneously. Advection is not required for, and is not applied to, acoustic elements.

The following topics are discussed:

Related Topics
Defining ALE adaptive mesh domains in Abaqus/Standard
In Other Guides
*ADAPTIVE MESH
*ADAPTIVE MESH CONSTRAINT
*ADAPTIVE MESH CONTROLS
Customizing ALE adaptive meshing

ProductsAbaqus/StandardAbaqus/CAE