“Progressive Shell Quasistatics for Unstructured Meshes” by Zhang, Dumas, Fei, Jacobson, James, et al. …
Conference:
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Title:
- Progressive Shell Quasistatics for Unstructured Meshes
Session/Category Title: Shells
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Abstract:
Thin shell structures exhibit complex behaviors critical for modeling and design across wide-ranging applications. To capture their mechanical response requires finely detailed, high-resolution meshes. Corresponding simulations for predicting equilibria with these meshes are expensive, whereas coarse-mesh simulations can be fast but generate unacceptable artifacts and inaccuracies. The recently proposed progressive simulation framework [Zhang et al. 2022] offers a promising avenue to address these limitations with consistent and progressively improving simulation over a hierarchy of increasingly higher-resolution models. Unfortunately, it is currently severely limited in application to meshes and shapes generated via Loop subdivision. We propose Progressive Shells Quasistatics to extend progressive simulation to the high-fidelity modeling and design of all input shell (and plate) geometries with unstructured (as well as structured) triangle meshes. To do so we construct a fine-to-coarse hierarchy with a novel nonlinear prolongation operator custom-suited for curved-surface simulation that is rest-shape preserving, supports complex curved boundaries, and enables the reconstruction of detailed geometries from coarse-level meshes. Then, to enable convergent, high-quality solutions with robust contact handling, we propose a new, safe and efficient shape-preserving upsampling method that ensures non-intersection and strain-limits during refinement. With these core contributions, Progressive Shell Quasistatics enables, for the first time, wide-generality for progressive simulation including support for arbitrary curved-shell geometries, progressive collision objects, curved boundaries, and unstructured triangle meshes — all while ensuring that preview and final solutions remain free of intersections. We demonstrate these features across a wide range of stress-tests and examples where progressive simulation captures the wrinkling, folding, twisting and buckling behaviors of frictionally contacting thin shells.
