Open Access

ARTICLE

Eliminating Slivers in Three-Dimensional Finite Element Models

R.H. Moore¹, S. Saigal²

1 CMU, Pittsburgh, PA, U.S.A.
2 USF, Tampa, FL, U.S.A

Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences 2005, 7(3), 283-292. https://doi.org/10.3970/cmes.2005.007.283

Abstract

An efficient method for treating slivers and other poorly shaped elements in finite element solutions is presented. A major difficulty for finite element analyses arises from the creation of slivers in automated mesh generation. Sliver shaped elements can degrade the accuracy of a solution and are difficult to remove from a mesh. The proposed method treats slivers by first merging them with neighboring elements to form polyhedra and next subdividing the polyhedra into well-shaped tetrahedral elements. The method does not require the cumbersome and expensive operations of addition or rearrangement of nodes. The validity and accuracy of the present method are demonstrated through the evaluation of a performance metric for a set of example problems.

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Keywords

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