[Gmsh] Enquiry: making a stl file

[Christophe Geuzaine]

> On 17 Feb 2020, at 16:06, Rioual Francois <francois.rioual at inrae.fr> wrote:
> 
> Good afternoon,
> 
> May I write to you concerning my problem:
>  I made a packing a spherical beads (representing a porous material) with a discrete element software (yade).
> So I can have all the coordinates of the centres and radii of the spherical beads.
> I want to save the geometry of this porous medium into a .stl file for further processing (in comsol).
> In order to do that, I was advised to use gmsh; can you explain me how I can proceed ??  
> 

Here's a simple example to create a cube from which you remove randomly positioned spheres in Gmsh:

SetFactory("OpenCASCADE");
DefineConstant[
  rmin = {0.02, Name "Min radius"}
  rmax = {0.1, Name "Max radius"}
  n = {50, Name "Number of spheres"}
];
For i In {1:n}
  r = rmin + Rand(rmax - rmin);
  x = -0.5 + Rand(1);
  y = -0.5 + Rand(1);
  z = -0.5 + Rand(1);
  Sphere(i) = {x, y, z, r};
EndFor
Block(n + 1) = {-0.5, -0.5, -0.5, 1, 1, 1};
BooleanDifference{ Volume{n+1}; Delete; }{ Volume{1:n}; Delete; }
Mesh.CharacteristicLengthFromCurvature = 1;

You can mesh this in 2D (and save as STL) but you can directly generate a 3D mesh as well directly in Gmsh.

Christophe


> Thank you for your reply,
> 
> Best wishes
> 
> Vincent
> 
> 
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— 
Prof. Christophe Geuzaine
University of Liege, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science 
http://www.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/~geuzaine