Cleaning/Repairing Surface Mesh
This is just one example of how to prepare a surface mesh for further processing whether it's printing
or subsequent generation of a volume mesh. Here, I'll use a CAD generated geometry of an aortic root. When an STL file
is generated from DICOM files, the process of cleaning/repairing the surface mesh is more laborious.
I'm using netfabb Private: The following zone where I'd prefer the mesh to be of higher quality comes to mind: To reduce the triangles I decided to select the entire zone as shown in the following figure. Now, all these options and functions were chosen after I tried other options too. It won't be the best choice for every geometry and one needs to experiment to find what works the best. The following is the before and after figure of the original surface mesh and the "pretty" one after all the above steps applied. The old mesh before repair consists of 16784 triangles and the new mesh consists of 13176 triangles, which is also beneficial. The minimum and maximum edge lengths are 0 and 16.56 mm for the old mesh, respectively; and, 0.50 and 2.44 mm for the new mesh, respectively. Even if the minimum and maximum edge lengths belonged to the same element, the 5:1 ratio of the longest edge of an element to its shortest edge would still be satisfied. |
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Dept. of Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine
College of Osteopathic Medicine
New York Institute of Technology
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mtoma@nyit.edu