Introduction

The Gema Mesh plugin is a general purpose implementation of the Mesh concept from the GeMA framework. It supports the Node mesh, Cell mesh and Element mesh concepts. A general description of what is a Mesh, as seen by GeMA, its associated entities and data sets can be found in the reference manual on the Meshes page.

For the Gema Mesh plugin, both the mesh meta-data, its geometric description and initial data values are given in Lua, following the syntax described in the Plugin options page. The geometric description and initial values can also be loaded from a state dump file.

The following concepts are supported by that syntax:

Associating state variables with the mesh;
Adding node, cell and Gauss attributes to the mesh;
Associating property sets with the mesh;
Initializing state variable and node attribute values;
Initializing cell attribute values;
Associating cells with property set lines;
Creating heterogeneous cell groups;
Creating node sets;
Creating border sets;
Specifying integration rules for elements and element borders;
Defining and initializing values for ghost nodes;

All the standard GeMA mesh capabilities (addNodes, addCells, topology, ghostNodes, editGroups, clear and stateDump) are implemented by this plugin. In particular, topological queries are supported by a half-edge / half-side data structure implemented as a customized version of the structures proposed in IBHM - index-based data structures for 2D and 3D hybrid meshes.

Besides providing a basic mesh implementation, this plugin is structured for being inherited by other plugins extending the provided concepts. Thisis used, for example, in the XFem implementation.

Also, keep in mind that the functions provided by the meshLib set of scripts can be used to easilly create the node and element geometry descriptions for 2D "grid based" meshes.

Plugin Options

A reference manual documenting the configuration options for the Gema Mesh plugin can be found here.

GeMA project main page