A highly interactive three dimensional mesh generator

Many truly three-dimensional physical problems are amenable to finite element analysis. A mesh generator is therefore required. Solid modellers may be used to create unambiguous representations of solid objects. These can then, in principle, be used in any geometric application because of the formally complete representation; however it would appear that the geometric process of creating a finite element mesh has, with certain notable exceptions, been overlooked. Almost all such effort hitherto has been for implementation on large computers. The paper describes a highly interactive menu driven, 3-D finite element mesh generator, designed to run on a small dedicated mini-computer.