Earlier Hexahedral Meshing Product

KUBRIX, a product developed by SIW, is now owned by Itasca Consulting Group, Inc. and is sold by SIW under license)

Kubrix is a general-purpose auto hex mesher for Mechanical Computer-Aided Engineering (MCAE). It replaces manual mesh generation, which, on average, represents over 80% of the cost of MCAE projects.

Kubrix modifies a closed triangulated input mesh using fuzzy-logic block decomposition (1) until each triangle faces the x, y and z directions. A cartesian grid of the interior of the modified input is then reverse transformed resulting in an all-hex mesh of the original geometry.

Kubrix is fast and can build multi-material (contact surface) meshes with coinciding nodes at material boundaries. Most "bread and butter" automotive mechanical parts such as crankshafts, connecting rods, steering knuckles, engine mounts, etc. can be meshed in under a minute.

The main applications of Kubrix are in the automotive, biomedical, aerospace, manufacturing, electronics and research and development areas, with most applications concentrated in the automotive and aerospace component area.

Kubrix is available through both SIW, a reseller for Itasca, and Itasca Consulting Group, Inc.

Features of Kubrix

  • Multi-material meshing

  • Choice of block-structured, fully unstructured, or fully structured hexahedral mesh.

  • Uses a command-line with keyword-parameter pairs and a closed non-manifold triangulated mesh as input

  • Accepts mesh input in many standard engineering formats.

  • Output in many standard engineering formats.

  • Available as a WIN32 or X64 executable.

(1) “Automatic Block Decomposition Using Fuzzy Logic Analysis”, Reza Taghavi, Proceedings of the 9th International Meshing Roundtable, Sandia National Laboratories, New Orleans, USA, October 2000.

HEXAR, a product developed by this team at Cray Research, Inc. is now owned by HP Enterprise

Hexar is a general purpose all hex mesher. It works by immersing a triangular mesh representing the surface of the object to be meshed in a Cartesian stair step grid, deleting elements that fall entirely outside of the surface mesh and projecting every surface vertex of the remaining Cartesian grid onto the surface mesh (1).

Special treatment of concave ridges and corners, addition of boundary layer elements and a powerful variational smoothing technique guarantees an all-hexahedral mesh of the object.

Hexar is available through Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

(1) “Automatic, Parallel and Fault Tolerant Mesh Generation from CAD”, Reza Taghavi, Engineering with Computers, Springer-Verlag, January 1996