A Responsive Finite Element Method to Aid Interactive Geometric Modeling

Current computer-aided engineering systems use numerical-simulation methods mainly as offline verification tools to reject designs that don´t satisfy the required constraints, rather than as tools to guide users toward better designs. However, integrating real-time finite element method (FEM) into interactive geometric modeling can provide user guidance. During interactive editing, real-time feedback from numerical simulation guides users toward an improved design without tedious trial-and-error iterations. Careful reuse of previous computation results, such as meshes and matrices, on the basis of speed and accuracy trade-offs, have helped produce fast FEM analysis during interactive editing. Several 2D example applications and informal user studies show this approach´s effectiveness. Such tools could help nonexpert users design objects that satisfy physical constraints and help those users understand the underlying physical properties.