A Guaranteed-Quality Mesh for a Portion of the Spider's Surface
This shows a guaranteed-quality mesh for a portion of the surface of the spider. The mesh was created using the SimLab surface mesher, an automatic mesh generator that produces high quality triangular mesher for flat and curved surfaces. An important point about this mesher is that the resulting meshes are mathematically guaranteed to satisfy certain properties important for finite element analysis.
Now that the data has been massaged into a form suitable for analysis, we can perform a variety of numerical computations based on this discretization. The original goal here, an analysis of the maximum deformation for the spider, has not been completed, since this requires the ability to create a 3D tetrahedral mesh of the spider's volume. One of our current areas of research is to produce an automatic tetrahedral mesher that produces meshes of guaranteed quality.
To illustrate how a complete analysis can be accomplished, we use this existing mesh to solve a heat transfer problem.