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Simulation tools are becoming more and more popular in the automotive industry since they can significantly reduce the costs required for development of new models. Currently there are many computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools available on the market and becoming indispensable tools for R&D in many of the automotive applications. However there are some applications which require much effort by highly skilled engineers to prepare the model and impractical level of computation time even using a cluster computer using the conventional CFD tools due to the nature of physics and complexity of a geometry such like dip painting process. Therefore, corrosion protection engineers are striving to find an alternative solution. Another issue is that the main focus of those available CFD tools are problems occurring during the dip paint simulations and they omit problems occurring after the object dips out from the bath, such as retained water or bake drips.

The manual or semi-automatic preparation of triangular and tetrahedral meshes for simulations is a very time-consuming task. The mesh preprocessing software MERGE however masters this task fully automatically and in a considerably shorter timeframe. It takes CAD or STL data as input, repairs invalid meshes and connects them together. The small gaps between the input objects are automatically closed and even glancing intersections can be cut off. The output can be supplied in different variations, either as a mesh that minimizes the number of elements, as a mesh consisting of high-quality surface triangles, or as a conforming tetrahedral mesh, while all of these possibilities are suitable for CFD or CAE simulations. Connecting the meshes of an entire car body can be done in (as little as) a few hours and does not require any manual work.

Autonomous cars already exist, why should anybody these days spend manual time on mesh preparation? This is a task for a machine, not for a human being. In this session, we will show a one-click way to prepare the mesh for multi-bodies or complex topological objects for 3D printing. The underlying software is already in use for paint shop applications: here it prepares a body in white starting from a CAD geometry fully automatically with 5-8 hours computational time on a desktop machine, while requiring less than 15 minutes of manual work. As an input, tessellated data can be imported from several sources including automatic interfaces allowing to extract the data of multi-bodies from CAD. However, these data are often defective and not manifold. In addition, the describing surface is not represented in an exact way. The only exact information one can rely on at this stage is the position of the vertices of the mesh: they are located directly on the surface.

Autonomous cars already exist, why should anybody these days spend manual time on mesh preparation? This is a task for a machine, not for a human being. This paper shows a one-click way to prepare the mesh for multi-bodies or complex topological objects for CAX application and how to obtain autonomously suitable data cleaning and output qualities of complex multi object geometries. The underlying software is already in use for data cleaning, surface mesh generation and 3D mesh generation: here it prepares a body in white (BIW) starting from a CAD geometry to surface mesh, including data cleaning fully automatically with 5-8 hours computational time on a desktop machine, while requiring less than 15 minutes of manual work. Firstly, during the import process the object gets subdivided and differentiates each part as sheet or solid. Each of these parts are moved to the global coordinate system. The user can review if the input data is the correct one.

Simulations need high quality mesh representations as input which are often manually prepared. The fully automatic mesh preprocessor software MERGE avoids this time consuming task. The software CAD or STL data as input, repairs invalid meshes and merges the input objects together. Small gaps between the input objects are automatically closed. The output surface mesh can be supplied in two different flavors, either as a mesh that minimizes the number of elements or as a mesh consisting of high quality triangles, ready for 3D meshing. A closed and connected surface mesh of an entire car body can be prepared overnight in a fully automatic manner.