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Software Products

BlockRanger

Griddle

BlockRanger is Griddle’s interactive, easy-to-use, all-hexahedral mapped volume mesh generator. Hexahedral structured meshes provide strict control of element quality, spatial distribution, and orientation and can result in more accurate stress calculations (e.g., for tunnel linings). Using Rhinoceros 3D CAD tools,* you can interactively partition, or build, an assembly of watertight solids with matching corners, edges and faces, consisting of tetrahedrons (4-sided), prisms (5-sided), and hexahedrons (6-sided). If the solids are contiguous, BlockRanger also ensures that the resulting mesh maintains grid conformity and continuity across block corners, edges, and faces.

As BlockRanger directly operates on solids, their names can be transferred to FLAC3D or 3DEC as named zone/block groups. Other geometrical features, such as contacts between solids, and unnamed solids are named automatically.

To create the hexahedral mesh, BlockRanger requires only three parameters:

  1. Maximum element edge length
  2. Minimum block resolution
  3. Target number of elements (for best aspect ratio)

BlockRanger exports high-quality structured hexahedral (brick) volumes for use with:

  • FLAC3D
  • 3DEC
  • ABAQUS
  • ANSYS
  • NASTRAN
  • LS-DYNA
  • VRML format
  • CSV format

New in BlockRanger

  • BR engine is more robust and able to mesh solids with concave surfaces and even solids with certain internal issues (e.g., not properly connected solid nodes/edges).
  • New option to automatically create boundary surface meshes in Rhino corresponding to the meshed solid. This surface mesh can later be used to create unstructured mesh around it (e.g., structured volume mesh within a tunnel and unstructured volume mesh around it).
  • New output formats:
    • 3DEC 7.0
      • Text (ASCII) or binary output
    • FLAC3D binary output
    • CSV file

*Rhinoceros 3D is developed by Robert McNeel & Associates and sold separately*. Griddle is a plug-in application for Rhino 3D.

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