Work flow for modeling-meshing

I am very new to FEniCS/FEA, and have been benefited from the help by this community in the past few weeks. My goal is to do FEA analysis on 3d printed parts, as well as x-ray/MRI generated bone/tissue models. I have been using pyVista/VTK to play with the models, and also used FEnics to solve very simple models generated by FEniCS build-in functions such as BoxMesh. I enjoyed a lot playing with FEniCS.

Now I try to understand the work flow, and choose the right softwares. My pyvista/VTK models are unstructureGrid models, either program-generated such as a cone and isosurfaces, or CT/MRI point clouds. I am not sure how to send VTK models to Gmsh for meshing. Specifically, pyvista/VTK models can be exported as stl or obj (both are surface mesh), but I don’t know if Gmsh can properly add a volume, and divide one water-tight surface piece into different components to assign physical groups.

What is the typical work flow for this kind of work? Did I choose the the right tools? People here talk about Gmsh but not that much about CGAL, which can build/mesh 3d objects as well. Is it possible to use CGAL to build meshes for FEniCS? Or shall I stick to Gmsh, and hope Gmsh has magics to process VTK models?

I would appreciate your thoughts. Thank you!

1 Like