Using shapeAI to Hex Mesh a Coronary Stent

mjohnson

Simplify your meshing workflow by leveraging shapeAI - already in HyperMesh - to sort and link similar parts, drastically reducing your model preparation time.

You’ve just finished preheating the oven, frozen pizza in hand.

You see on your phone that a colleague has passed you solid geometry for a new coronary stent design that will require simulation. 

Setting the timer for 10 minutes, you place the pie in the oven and make your way to your laptop.

After reading in the file into HyperMesh you realize that although the geometry is complex, having crowns, struts, and sinusoidally shaped sections, you quickly identify that these shapes are repetitive.   Using a few planar cuts, you can separate those common solids. 

Now for the fun part – you can utilize shapeAI to identify which of those solids match their counterparts, and with just a couple clicks, all those parts are sorted into groups and linked.  In this case, what started as a single complex solid became 78 separate solid “building blocks” which fell into just three groups.

Two of the pieces could be solid mapped with high quality hexahedral elements directly without any further division.

The third piece can be solid mapped just by creating a few surface trims through the interactive geometry edit.

Now that each of the three representative blocks have been hex meshed, the Sync command can propagate the mesh to the other 75 linked parts.

There is still a minute left on the pizza timer. 

You recognized that what started out as a single block of solid geometry could be split into many smaller solids that look alike. HyperMesh made those operations simple.  But then you invoked ShapeAI in the form of the Match tool to get those 78 solids sorted into just three categories.  With the parts grouped and linked, solid map meshing just three solids could be done in less time than it took to bake a pizza!

While the pizza is cooling, you have time to apply a morph to one of the parts in the model and then hit sync again to update all linked instances. 

Now it’s time to eat – and you can tell all your colleagues that you made AI do some of your work today!

Special thanks to Merve Sırtıkara for use of the public model.

Jakob Svensson_21541

Impressive! Is this feature available in Inspire or will it be in the future?

Joseph Pajot

Right now, the matching functionality with shapeAI is only in HyperMesh, but we plan to expand to other software as well.

AnılBurak

Great!

Can you share the tcl "Part from solid"