Finite element analysts and designers need to feel confident in the results of their analyses before sending a product to prototype or production. Mesh discretization can greatly influence the desired results. In this paper we present framework for adaptive mesh refinement to obtain FEA results with a desired accuracy. The process involves adaptively refining the mesh based on solution error norms until the result desired converges to certain accuracy. The adaptive refinement/meshing process must be fully automatic and very robust. We present an exhaustive method to create a fully automatic and integrated process that takes advantage of many of the mesh refinement and mesh optimization algorithms found in literature. The results of the process provide the user with the desired accuracy in the smallest number of iterations possible.
Joseph R. Tristano, Zhijian Chen, D. Alfred Hancq,