A locally refinable T-spline finite element method for CAD/CAE integration

Abstract

T-splines are recently proposed mathematical tools for geometric modeling, which are generalizations of B-splines. Local refinement can be performed effectively using T-splines while it is not the case when B-splines or NURBS are used. Using T-splines, patches with unmatched boundaries call be combined easily without special techniques. In the present study, an analysis framework using T-splines is proposed. In this framework, T-splines are used both for description of geometries and for approximation of solution spaces. This analysis framework can be a basis of a CAD/CAE integrated approach. In this approach, CAD models are directly imported as the analysis models without additional finite element modeling. Some numerical examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the current analysis framework.