Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) are disciplines with separate histories and consequently different conventions, data representations and workflows. In particular going from the design geometry to analysis geometry, let alone the other way around, can be a laborious task because of the separation between the two fields. We briefly characterise the design and analysis model spaces, and discuss how the gap is commonly bridged. The exchange between the two spaces is still a significant bottleneck and worth attention, in particular with the practice of simulation-based design being employed ever more. We discuss five previously proposed solutions or 'visions' of how to better integrate the two disciplines, and contrast these with our own vision of the analysis view as part of the multiple-view feature modelling paradigm.

A heterogeneous object (HO) modeling system independent of any commercial CAD software packages is introduced in this paper. Through this system, CAD models can be converted into 2D slices with heterogeneous material information for the fabrication of rapid prototyping technique. In this framework, volumetric dataset (VD) is employed to represent the material variations, which offers flexible manipulability to HO representation, while geometry model is used to describe the shape of an object, which can guarantee the accuracy of final HO slices. Two schemes are used to evaluate the composition variations in this system. Ray casting is utilized to render the HO volumetric dataset with the property of transparency.

Tetrahedral meshing algorithms balance meshing speed, expected mesh quality, strength of quality guarantees, parameter control of the user, and feasibility of implementation. Variational tetrahedral meshing focuses on creating meshes with highly regular tetrahedrons. The method has shown impressive results. However, most of the examples are smooth models, and comparatively little has been remarked about meshes of mechanical models for finite element analysis. The quality of the elements of such meshes is very important, but a good representation of the boundary is also essential for such analysis. Mechanical models often have boundaries with many distinctive features such as edges and corners that need to be well represented by the mesh. We have explored the application of variational tetrahedral meshing to these kind of models and have developed enhancements geared towards obtaining a representation of the boundary that is suitable for analysis. These enhancements are described, and several meshes generated by applying them are presented.

Finite element analysis is nowadays widely used for product testing. At various moments during the design phase, aspects of the physical behaviour of the product are simulated by performing an analysis of the model. For each analysis, a mesh needs to be created that represents the geometry of the model at that point. In particular during the later stages of the development cycle, often only minor modifications are made to a model between design iterations. In that case it can be beneficial to reuse part of the previous mesh, especially if it was costly to construct. A new method is presented that efficiently constructs a tetrahedral mesh based on a tetrahedral mesh of a feature model at an earlier point of the design cycle. This is done by analysing the difference of the two feature models from the point of view of the individual features. By this means we can find a natural correspondence between the geometries of the feature models, and relate this to the mesh of the earlier model. We discuss the algorithm, gained improvements, quality of the results, and conditions for this method to be effective.