9.1.1    Intersecting elements

Important definition:

Two elements are defined to be non-intersecting if they obey the following condition:

·       In each of the cross sections parallel to the XY plane the pair of the elements is either disjoint or one of the elements is entirely included in the other.

·       If an element A is included in element B but their borders partially coincide the elements can be treated as non-intersecting only if the element A is defined as “filled inside” by a particular medium while the element B as “filled outside” by this or other medium.

Intersecting elements must be treated by the Join operations. These operations produce out of them new elements that are non-intersecting. If the intersecting elements are still present during the mesh generation by QW-Editor, the mesh generator may not treat them in accordance with the user’s intention. The resulting analysis will then be erroneous as exemplified in the Basic Join operations chapter. In general it cannot be avoided that it is the user’s responsibility to provide consistent data to the editor and thus to eliminate intersecting elements before performing Export.

Note that according to the above definition if an element is internally tangential to another one it should in general be treated as intersecting. However some of such situations (described in When we do not need Join operations chapter) are automatically detected by the QW-Editor and treated correctly without the Join operation.

Note: In case of any doubts if the geometry of the project was correctly defined by the user and correctly understood by the mesh generator we strongly recommend to verify the meshing results using Test Mesh window of QW-Simulator.