| dc.description.abstract | In injection molding, thin-shell parts exist commonly. Mold flow analysis is extensively used in injection molding to assist the product and mold design, as well as the process analysis. In mold flow analysis, it is necessary to generate solid meshes for a CAD model so that the solver can perform the required analysis. The quantity, structure and quality of solid meshes can affect the efficiency and accuracy of the simulation. Generally, tetrahedral meshes are extensively used as it is easy to be generated automatically. However, the quality of this type of mesh is worse and it tends to result in inaccurate simulation result. Prismatic and hexahedral meshes are an alternative for improving the simulation result. These two types of meshes, however, are often generated manually. The purpose of this study is to develop an algorithm for decomposing the volume of the thin shell of a thin-shell CAD model, which can assist the generation of better type of meshes for the model. The proposed method will employ the feature recognition technology developed in our laboratory to separate protrusions from the thin shell, and then divide the remaining thin shell into several types of regions, including main regions, feature regions and residual regions. Each region is essentially described by a set of closed contours. The primary work of this study to develop algorithms to compute the edges and contours for all types of regions. All regions established are tightly neighboring to each other, without any gap in between, and hence accurately describe the volume of the thin shell. | en_US |