Automatic recognition and suppression of holes on mold bases for finite element applications

As the required accuracy of mold flow analysis has recently increased, it has become necessary to consider all components of a mold base and to generate solid meshes for all of them. If holes on all mold components are kept in mesh generation, the mesh size near each hole must be adapted to maintain the shape accurately. This, however, not only increases the effort required to edit the meshes, but also increases the total amount of meshes tremendously. The objective of this study is to present a method for the recognition and suppression of holes on mold bases. A preliminary computation of the data required for hole recognition is described, which includes entity grouping, fillet recognition, and loop recognition. An algorithm for recognizing holes on all mold components can thus be implemented, which includes the recognition of all face compositions on various kinds of “ladder” structures that involve several holes connected to each other. All hole structures can then be suppressed automatically. The recognition and suppression of holes on two mold bases are presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed technique.