[Gmsh] surface mesh, connect the faces of a compound

[Bernd Hahnebach]

Hi there,

This is my first post to the mailing list so I may introduce myself  
first. The "identifier" given to me by my parents is Bernd and this  
corresponds to what most people call myself. The bred to feed myself  
an my familiy I earn in an engineering office near Zuerich in  
Switzerland. I'm structural engineer in the building industry. In my  
spare time I develop on the FEM Workbench and on the Arch Workbench of  
the parametric open source cad plattform FreeCAD. This is why I'm gone  
write to this list.


FreeCAD uses for internal parametric surface and solid meshing netgen.  
AFAIK due to licence incompatibility between FreeCAD and GMSH it has  
never been an option to use GMSH instead. But there exists a FreeCAD  
macro which uses the GMSH installed on ones computer for meshing. Most  
users mainly use this GMSH macro for meshing their models including  
myself. The macro exports a *.step meshes with GMSH and imports the  
*.unv mesh back into FreeCAD. Babbled enought,the important part of  
the post ...


I run into trouble with meshing compunds of faces. The faces where not  
connected to each other and thus a Finite Element Analysis will fail  
to work without manual connection off all the faces of the compund. As  
a example a very simple compund of just two faces is taken.

mesh command:
gmsh compound_of_faces.step -3 -format unv -o compound_of_faces.unv  
-algo netgen -clmax 100,00 -order 2 -optimize

gmsh --version
2.8.5
on Debian Jesie

I was wondering if it is possible to tell GMSH to mesh a connected  
Surface Mesh of a compund of faces?

The files could be downloaded here:  
https://cloud.woelkli.com/public.php?service=files&t=1cfd13febed7694726b902cdb36476d4


Kind Regards and thanks to all people who have ever contributed to  
GMSH development.

Bernd