Marco,

I am actually tied up for the next week or so, so if you can post a sample in 
that timeframe that would be perfect.

Thanks very much

Dennis

From: Marco Nawijn [mailto:naw...@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, August 25, 2015 11:21 AM
To: Dennis Conklin
Cc: Paraview (paraview@paraview.org)
Subject: Re: [EXT] Re: [Paraview] How to find the nearest quad element?

Hi Dennis,

You might also be interested in the vtkCellCenters filter. As the name 
suggests, it
will generate the centers of the cells for you. If you are not in a big rush, I 
can build
you a small self contained sample in Python that demonstrates the filter and the
use of the point locator. I am a little busy at the moment, but I can post the 
sample
in a couple of days.

Marco


On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 1:40 PM, Dennis Conklin 
<dennis_conk...@goodyear.com<mailto:dennis_conk...@goodyear.com>> wrote:
Marco,

Thanks for that tip – I’m not very familiar with vtk and I’ve never heard of 
that class but it seems appropriate so I will try to dig into it.

Thanks again

Dennis

From: Marco Nawijn [mailto:naw...@gmail.com<mailto:naw...@gmail.com>]
Sent: Monday, August 24, 2015 10:28 AM
To: Dennis Conklin
Cc: Paraview (paraview@paraview.org<mailto:paraview@paraview.org>)
Subject: [EXT] Re: [Paraview] How to find the nearest quad element?

What about the following:

Generate two additional datasets, one containing (an approximate of) the center 
of the hex elements, the second the center of the quads. Then create a 
vtkKdTreePointLocator object based on the center points of the quad elements. 
Than loop over the centers of the hex elements and use one of the Find* methods 
to get the closest quad.

Marco




On Fri, Aug 21, 2015 at 2:21 PM, Dennis Conklin 
<dennis_conk...@goodyear.com<mailto:dennis_conk...@goodyear.com>> wrote:

Sam,

Thanks for responding.  You have helped me several times in the past and I am 
always grateful for your insights.  In this case there is considerable 
refinement in the model, so only a very small portion of the hex elements are 
in immediate contact with quads.   Also you could think of places like the 
tread in the tire where there is no reinforcement whatsoever.

Another approach which I have considered is a wave propagation technique, where 
in the first wave every hex immediately adjacent to a quad gets direction 
cosines assigned (as you suggest).   Then you loop thru the remaining elements 
and assign cosines from any adjacent quad or hex that has cosines.   Eventually 
the direction cosines will propagate throughout the model.   A major 
complication is that wavefronts will collide and then you will have to choose 
which of several conflicting neighbor cosines to adopt.  Averaging is one 
approach but certain structures give adjoining cosines which are 180 degrees 
reversed, so averaging would give you an indeterminate direction.

I am toying now with some pseudo-variables, such as combinations of radius and 
lateral location, combined with zoning, to try to find a quantity that is 
unique for a local section of the geometry, to reduce the  search size for each 
hex element.

I am still hoping for a very clever scheme which someone may suggest before I 
proceed with these much more brute force methods.

Dennis



Sam Key Wrote:

Dennis,

Assuming for the moment that each quad 4-tuple is a finite element that 
contains one or more tire reinforcement items, and that each quad 4-tuple is 
"sandwiched" in between two hex 8-node finite elements, then the quad's 4-tuple 
is also a surface facet of two different 8-node hexahedrons. Both hexhedrons 
are the 'closest' hexhedrons to the quad. Given the usual organization of 
'element blocks' in the Exodus-II datum structures, the two closest hexahedrons 
will be located on the surface of their respective element blocks.

Using material ID's which are also element block ID's, have the software 
generate surface side-sets for each of these two element blocks specified with 
these two material ID's. With luck, each member in the side-set will be 
specified as a 2-tuple, (Elem# in the block, Quad-Face# in the hexah)

With his info, you can confine your search to finding the side-set item that 
has a 4-tuple that matches your quad's 4-tuple. The search is reduced to a 
relatively small collection of hexahedral surface 4-tuple faces.

Hope this helps.

Samuel W Key FMA Development, LLC 1005 39th Ave NE Great Falls, Montana 59404 
USA


From: Dennis Conklin
Sent: Thursday, August 20, 2015 3:52 PM
To: Paraview (paraview@paraview.org<mailto:paraview@paraview.org>)
Subject: How to find the nearest quad element?

All,

I have an Exodus, multi-block model.  Most of the blocks are hex elements, and 
some are layers of quads (tires are composite structures).  I would like to 
establish local strains which are oriented in the direction of the nearest quad 
layer.  To do this I need to identify, for each hex in the model, which quad 
element in the model is closest to the hex.    Then I can extract directions 
from the quad element and rotate the strain tensor in the hex to these local 
coordinates.

My question is,  is there some clever and efficient way to quickly determine 
the nearest quad for each hex in the model.  Keep in mind that there are 
multiple blocks of quads, but if there is some way to address the quad blocks 
one at a time, I could make this work.

The brute force way is:
Loop over every hex in the model:
      Loop over every quad in the model:
             Calculate the distance between hex and quad
             Smallest distance wins!

That is a pretty brutally inefficient calc (several million hex elements) that 
I am trying to avoid – any ideas about how best to approach this.   I’m hoping 
for some elegant way to use connectivity or something of that sort.

Thanks for looking

Dennis

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