A hexahedral-dominant FE meshing technique using trimmed hexahedral elements preserving sharp edges and corners

This study presents a novel scheme to generate trimmed hexahedral meshes for the finite element analysis of solids with sharp edges and corners. An initial trimmed hexahedral mesh is created by cutting a background hexahedral grid with a geometric surface representing the solid boundary. Feature-preserving trimmed hexahedral elements are constructed by modifying the connectivity of initial trimmed hexahedral elements with feature nodes created at the sharp edges and corners interacting with the grid cells. A Laplacian mesh smoothing technique is employed to improve the shape quality of trimmed hexahedral elements without losing the sharp features. The polyhedral shape functions for feature-preserving trimmed hexahedral elements are effectively constructed based on the feature-based tetrahedral subdomains. The performance of the present method is investigated through the finite element analysis of structures with sharp features.