[Gmsh] Help to use Gmsh for BEM

[José Jeferson Rêgo Silva]

Dear Sirs.

We are trying to use *Gmsh* as a mesh generator for a 3D boundary 
element software (surface modeling).
Do you have any experience in doing so?

The purpose of our work is academic, for teaching and research, helping 
to use our BE software.
We understand that for others purposes it will be necessary a different 
type of license.

It seems that modeling surfaces with *Gmsh* could help.
Our major difficulty is when dealing with adjacent elements that do not 
share the same functional nodes.
The geometric nodes, however, are kept the same, naturally.

For these cases, we are used to employ the so-called "discontinuous 
element" (also known as "non-conforming" element).
An alternative is to use "double nodes", that is not our case.

The idea of discontinuous element is to place the functional nodes 
inside the element, instead of on its boundary (edge).
On the contrary of FEM, this do not affect BEM formulations.

So, we would like to know if *Gmsh *has this capability of creating new 
nodes inside the elements, when necessary, accordingly to different 
types of connectivity between adjacent elements. Sometimes an surface 
element can share functional nodes with one (or more) of its adjacent 
elements, and do not share functional nodes with the others.

It is not necessary *Gmsh* generate the coordinates for these new nodes. 
Our software can handle it.
It is necessary, however, to number these new nodes and associate them 
to each element (keeping the same element orientation - ordering of 
their nodes), as it is already done for the others standard (geometric) 
nodes.

Thanks in advance.
Greetings.

J. Jeferson Rêgo Silva
Civil Engineering Department - UFPE
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