Want to plot FEM mesh models in 3D graph control of LabVIEW

[MSingh]

Hello,

I am trying to plot FEM mesh models in the 3D graph control of LabVIEW. Has anyone ever tried doing this?

Thanks in advance.

MS

[CKap]

Hey MS,

Although I couldn't find any specific examples related to FEM & 3D Graph, but there are a lot of examples available that demonstrate the use of 3D Surface Graph control. Few of them actually ship with LabVIEW and could be located through the example finder. You can launch the example finder by click on the Help menu and then selecting "Find Examples". Search for 3D and you will find examples pertraining to the 3D Surface Graph control. Also there is one example available for FEM. You can look that up too.

Regards,

Chetan K

Application Engineer

National Instruments

[MSingh]

Chetan,

Thanks for the reply. I have seen the examples in the example finder but most of them deal with parametric surfaces. On the other hand, most of the real world FEM models are not formed using uniform parametric surfaces. I need to find some way of plotting irregular gemetry without using parametric surfaces or some way of converting the irregular FEM model surface element arrangement into discretized parametric surfaces.

Thanks for the reply.

MS

PS: The FEM example you mentioned, is an FEA analysis VI and not for displaying FEM meshes in 3D Graph.

[Ben]

Starting with reply # 7 of this thread

http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=170&message.id=143663&jump=true

I share a worse case 3-d graph example.

Download what I shared there, and play with the plot styles. One of the styles is "lines". In that mode it just shows you the grid of the 3-d surface.

The 3-d graph can handle arbirtary XYZ values.

Ben

PS: If I was smart, I'd edit my signature to contain the text above.

But I aint so I won't

Message Edited by Ben on 08-11-2006 02:41 PM

[unclebump]

if you have another software package that can display a mesh, maybe you could use an activex control for this program??

[Ben]

This is what that example looks like using "lines" and no color mapping.

Ben

Message Edited by Ben on 08-11-2006 03:03 PM

[unclebump]

Do you have any sample data that you could post??

[MSingh]

Sorry for late reply. I am attaching the image of a surface discretized into quad and tria elements.

I am also attaching a text file showing the coordinates of nodes under the *NODE entry. How the nodes are connected to form elements is defined under the *ELEMENT_SHELL entries. For a quad element the element definition is comprised of four node number entries after the element and part number entries. For triangular elements there still are four node number entries but one of the node numbers is duplicated in the end.

Question again: How can I show this kind of FEM data in 3D graph?

Thanks

[Ben]

The illustrated code uses a sub-set of your data to produce what may be what you are after.

I use a seperate plot for each quad.

Ben

PS see other thread for sub-VI

Message Edited by Ben on 08-14-2006 08:51 PM

Message Edited by Ben on 08-14-2006 08:51 PM

[unclebump]

Hi Ben,

If you swapped the first and fourth columns, would it eliminate the gaps where the numbers are duplicated??