Meeting Abstract
Originally designed for engineers, finite element analysis (FEA) is a digital technique for understanding how materials respond to applied physical forces. In biology, FEA can be used to understand how all or part of an organism responds to the forces of flight, combat, locomotion, etc. across taxa, between individuals, or through life. In biological data from X-ray computed tomography or laser scanning, assigning parts of an organism to a material typically requires subjective segmentation. Additionally, FEA takes volumetric meshes as input and the quality of this mesh can have a dramatic effect on the interpretation of the FE model. Both steps, then, require objective and accurate approaches for meaningful FE simulation. Using Amira with the XImagePAQ and XWind extensions allows users to automate segmentation workflows and easily generate accurate tetrahedral meshes for FEA. Our software now uses a new Delauney refinement for generating tetrahedral meshes which improves upon our legacy advancing front method. The previous method could produce nonconforming meshes with poor aspect ratios and slivers and might not converge. The new method prioritizes the creation of tetrahedrons with ‘good’ aspect ratios that are not too-small or too-large and is entirely automated. The result is a conformal unstructured tetrahedral mesh that can be directly exported to commercial FEA solvers such as Abaqus, ANSYS, and COMSOL Multiphysics. This presentation will include a discussion of our improvements to meshing with related biomechanical modeling case studies.
