quadrilateral elements?

Hi,

Is Salome capable of generating automatic unstructure quadrilateral elements on one surface of the model (preferable using pave method)?
If it is possible, I would like to use the mesh on this face and then extrude in the third direction to get all Hex elements. Thanks!

phsieh2005

Hello,

I don't think it is possible to directly generate unstructured quads in the current version of the Mesh module. You can do structured quad/hex mesh or unstructured tri/tet mesh for sure. But then from unstructured tri-mesh, you can recombine the triangles into quads with the command Modification->Union of triangles in the Mesh module. But the quality of the final mesh is not comparable as what you could get with a direct unstructured quad meshing algo...

Maybe the Pattern Mapping option could be usefull is you have a more or less basic geometry of the face. The principle is the following: you start by creating a pattern on a simple face geometry (rectangle for ex) and then you can \"Map\" (=deform and fit) this pattern on a curved face that as a similar topology (same number of corners/edges). I have not used this option yet, so all I know is the principle.