vecmesh

This program is a preprocessing tool, which prepares all input data for the calculations with the finite element program vecu and its descendants. The finite element mesh can be read in several different formats. The ``neutral file'' format of PATRAN and GEOMPACK finite element definition files are supported. In addition, there is an interface to AGM, the adaptive grid manager, which can be used to adaptively refine finite element meshes.

Then, the input data are checked for consistency. All normals of surface elements, whose orientation is defined by the node numbers of the corners, have to point in outward direction. To take full advantage of the sparsity of the finite element matrices, they must have a band structure. Thus, the nodes of the mesh are renumbered, if necessary.

The main task of vecmesh is the computation of the boundary matrix for the hybrid finite element/boundary element method (cf. section ). Finally, the material parameters are read and all data are stored in a suitable data structure for the finite element package VECFEM, on which the finite element programs are based.