[Gmsh] Meshing thin, curved solids

[Tibi Chelcea]

Hi,

 

I've encountered a problem for a design I'm trying to mesh with Gmsh.
Basically, the issue is in a solid that looks like a hollow cone; the wall
cone is very thin (the thickness of the wall is 0.1, while the top diameter
of the cone is 10, and the bottom is 6; height is 14). The issue seems to be
with the 2D meshing of the outer and inner cone surfaces: some of the
triangles from the outer surface intersect some triangles on the inner
surface.

This design is supposed to be simulated a lot of times with slight
variations, so I'd like to get a small mesh that's amenable to quick
simulations. In my experiments so far a mesh of about 100K elements with a
meshing time of 45s is good.

I can change Mesh.MinimumCirclePoints in the .geo file, but if I set it high
enough to avoid the issue, meshing takes 4 minutes and results in 800k mesh
elements. I can also change the characteristic length (either for the entire
design or just a box around this solid), but the result is again a large
mesh and very slow meshing.

Is there a way to avoid the issue of intersecting triangles while avoid a
big penalty in speed/size?

Thanks.
Tibi

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