44,090 research outputs found
The Double Hierarchy Method: a parallel 3D contact method for the interaction of spherical particles with rigid FE boundaries using the DEM
The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40571-016-0109-4In this work, we present a new methodology for the treatment of the contact interaction between rigid boundaries and spherical discrete elements (DE). Rigid body parts are present in most of large-scale simulations. The surfaces of the rigid parts are commonly meshed with a finite element-like (FE) discretization. The contact detection and calculation between those DE and the discretized boundaries is not straightforward and has been addressed by different approaches. The algorithm presented in this paper considers the contact of the DEs with the geometric primitives of a FE mesh, i.e. facet, edge or vertex. To do so, the original hierarchical method presented by Horner et al. (J Eng Mech 127(10):1027–1032, 2001) is extended with a new insight leading to a robust, fast and accurate 3D contact algorithm which is fully parallelizable. The implementation of the method has been developed in order to deal ideally with triangles and quadrilaterals. If the boundaries are discretized with another type of geometries, the method can be easily extended to higher order planar convex polyhedra. A detailed description of the procedure followed to treat a wide range of cases is presented. The description of the developed algorithm and its validation is verified with several practical examples. The parallelization capabilities and the obtained performance are presented with the study of an industrial application example.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
TetSplat: Real-time Rendering and Volume Clipping of Large Unstructured Tetrahedral Meshes
We present a novel approach to interactive visualization and exploration of large unstructured tetrahedral meshes. These massive 3D meshes are used in mission-critical CFD and structural mechanics simulations, and typically sample multiple field values on several millions of unstructured grid points. Our method relies on the pre-processing of the tetrahedral mesh to partition it into non-convex boundaries and internal fragments that are subsequently encoded into compressed multi-resolution data representations. These compact hierarchical data structures are then adaptively rendered and probed in real-time on a commodity PC. Our point-based rendering algorithm, which is inspired by QSplat, employs a simple but highly efficient splatting technique that guarantees interactive frame-rates regardless of the size of the input mesh and the available rendering hardware. It furthermore allows for real-time probing of the volumetric data-set through constructive solid geometry operations as well as interactive editing of color transfer functions for an arbitrary number of field values. Thus, the presented visualization technique allows end-users for the first time to interactively render and explore very large unstructured tetrahedral meshes on relatively inexpensive hardware
Load-Balancing for Parallel Delaunay Triangulations
Computing the Delaunay triangulation (DT) of a given point set in
is one of the fundamental operations in computational geometry.
Recently, Funke and Sanders (2017) presented a divide-and-conquer DT algorithm
that merges two partial triangulations by re-triangulating a small subset of
their vertices - the border vertices - and combining the three triangulations
efficiently via parallel hash table lookups. The input point division should
therefore yield roughly equal-sized partitions for good load-balancing and also
result in a small number of border vertices for fast merging. In this paper, we
present a novel divide-step based on partitioning the triangulation of a small
sample of the input points. In experiments on synthetic and real-world data
sets, we achieve nearly perfectly balanced partitions and small border
triangulations. This almost cuts running time in half compared to
non-data-sensitive division schemes on inputs exhibiting an exploitable
underlying structure.Comment: Short version submitted to EuroPar 201
QuickCSG: Fast Arbitrary Boolean Combinations of N Solids
QuickCSG computes the result for general N-polyhedron boolean expressions
without an intermediate tree of solids. We propose a vertex-centric view of the
problem, which simplifies the identification of final geometric contributions,
and facilitates its spatial decomposition. The problem is then cast in a single
KD-tree exploration, geared toward the result by early pruning of any region of
space not contributing to the final surface. We assume strong regularity
properties on the input meshes and that they are in general position. This
simplifying assumption, in combination with our vertex-centric approach,
improves the speed of the approach. Complemented with a task-stealing
parallelization, the algorithm achieves breakthrough performance, one to two
orders of magnitude speedups with respect to state-of-the-art CPU algorithms,
on boolean operations over two to dozens of polyhedra. The algorithm also
outperforms GPU implementations with approximate discretizations, while
producing an output without redundant facets. Despite the restrictive
assumptions on the input, we show the usefulness of QuickCSG for applications
with large CSG problems and strong temporal constraints, e.g. modeling for 3D
printers, reconstruction from visual hulls and collision detection
Topological correction of hypertextured implicit surfaces for ray casting
Hypertextures are a useful modelling tool in that they
can add three-dimensional detail to the surface of otherwise
smooth objects. Hypertextures can be rendered as implicit
surfaces, resulting in objects with a complex but well
defined boundary. However, representing a hypertexture as
an implicit surface often results in many small parts being
detached from the main surface, turning an object into a
disconnected set. Depending on the context, this can detract
from the realism in a scene where one usually does not
expect a solid object to have clouds of smaller objects floating around it. We present a topology correction technique, integrated in a ray casting algorithm for hypertextured implicit surfaces, that detects and removes all the surface components that have become disconnected from the main surface. Our method works with implicit surfaces that are C2 continuous and uses Morse theory to find the critical points of the surface. The method follows the separatrix lines joining the critical points to isolate disconnected components
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