Study of advanced parametric meshing techniques for gearbox dynamic analysis

In Finite Element Analysis, the characteristics of the mesh (quality and classification) play a major role in the final result; such characteristics include: mesh quality, kinds of elements, mesh refinement, and many others. It is true indeed that commercial softwares are able, often with good results, to create meshes for basically any kind of components. These softwares, however, present a fundamental limitation. They are not open-source: this means that their code is not directly available to the consumer and can not be modified in order to adapt the meshing process to specific cases and requirements. In specific applications, after the mesh is generated automatically by one of these softwares, it requires to be modified by hand for it to meet the required characteristics. This post process has two main issues: first of all it often requires several hours of additional work (and this represents a cost in terms of labor); second, it introduces the risk of human error. Hence, the possibility to end up, after hours of work, with an invalid geometry is more than tangible. The objective of this thesis is to create a tool which takes care of this issues by making the process fully automatic. The application of the tool are very specific, as it was customized in order to create meshes for gearbox components, even though it can be easily adapted to different scenarios. The tool is not able to directly mesh 3D components; instead, it relies on the possibility to obtain a 3D component from the transformation of a 2D section of it. For the application it was developed for, it proved to be very effective since many of the components (if not all of them) are either axis-symmetric or cyclic-symmetric.