A survey of CAD model simplification techniques for physics-based simulation applications

Automated CAD model simplification plays an important role in effectively utilizing physics-based simulation during the product realization process. Currently a rich body of literature exists that describe many successful techniques for fully-automatic or semi-automatic simplification of CAD models for a wide variety of applications. The purpose of this paper is to compile a list of the techniques that are relevant for physics-based simulations problems and to characterize them based on their attributes. We have classified them into the following four categories: techniques based on surface entity based operators, volume entity based operators, explicit feature based operators, and dimension reduction operators. This paper also presents the necessary background information in the CAD model representation to assist the new readers. We conclude the paper by outlining open research directions in this field. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.