A quadrilateral mesh generator for adaptive procedures in bulk forming processes

The simulation of real industry metal forming processes often requires the presence of adaptive procedures. With that purpose a quadrilateral mesh gen erator was developed. The algorithm is based on the simple fact that it is always possible to subdivide a region into quadrilaterals whenever the poly gonal line that forms its boundary has an even number of sides and that, by joining two contiguous triangles, a quadrilateral may be formed. Rather th an using an advancing front technique a cloud of nodal points is initially formed based on error estimators and criteria to define an optimal element size. With this, procedure, using an adaptive process, the refinement is cr eated where it will be needed.