[Gmsh] Load a partial mesh into Gmsh

[Geordie McBain]

2011/7/14 Tibi Chelcea <tibich72 at gmail.com>:
> I'm working on a system that simulates a family of components; these
> components are fixed (as in modeled once, and then re-used again and again),
> but the heatsinks attached to them are user-defined. Gmsh takes a long time
> to mesh this system, so I'd like to cut down the time used for meshing. I
> was wondering whether it's possible to use Gmsh as follows:
> - Pre-mesh each of the components and save these meshes
> - Then, when meshing the entire system (a component + an user-defined
> heatsink), Gmsh loads the mesh for the component, and meshes only the
> heatsink.
> Is this possible to do? I've seen some mentioning of "background mesh" in
> the documentation, but there is very little on that, and it's not clear
> whether it does what I'd like or how to define it.
> Any hint/help is really appreciated.

I don't know the answer to your question, though it does sound like a
useful thing to be able to do.

But I can tell you that background meshes aren't relevant, they're for
creating nonuniformity, i.e. having the element size vary from place
to place.  See

  http://geuz.org/gmsh/doc/texinfo/gmsh.html#Specifying-mesh-element-sizes

for the documentation and Tutorial 7 for an example

  http://geuz.org/gmsh/doc/texinfo/gmsh.html#t7_002egeo