*** 9760229 Facello This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will explore a novel approach to automatic quality surface and volume mesh generation for 3D models. The software to be developed will be a critical extension to the firm's Wrap that reconstructs surfaces and solids from arbitrary 3D point data, providing the ability to automatically produce quality surface and volume meshes directly from the output of 3D scanners. Currently, mesh generation is often a separate package apart from the modeling software, and the creation of a finite element analysis (FEA) model is a time consuming process requiring a tedious translation of the computer assisted design (CAD) model into an FEA model or the construction of a new, duplicate model in the FEA environment. The inability to automatically generate meshes with guaranteed local quality has hampered the numerical methods used to analyze complicated geometric shapes. The software module, if successfully implemented and combined with Wrap, will solve one of the most difficult problems in mesh generation. The integration of surface reconstruction and mesh improvement provides a compact solution that will enable both important time savings and ease of use from the total integration and automation of modeling and mesh generation for reverse engineering problems. ***
