At the USNCCM13, we discussed the fact that (currently) Peridigm only accepts Exodus II mesh files. The only software that generates Exodus II mesh files is the powerful Cubeit. Cubeit’s license can also be expensive, especially for someone who only wants to use the conversion to Exodus II feature to import geometries in Peridigm… Patrick discussed the possibility of writing our own conversion script that converts a widely used free meshing format to Exodus II. We eventually decided to use Gmsh as an input for our script, which then converts Gmsh meshes to Exodus II.

The code is available here, everything is written in python so the only requirement is VTK >=5.8 with the python wrapper (sudo apt-get install python-vtk). We currently support triangles and quadrangles for 2D elements and tetrahedrons for 3D elements.

Examples

2D

Mesh generated with gmsh	Exodus geometry visualized with paraview

3D

Mesh generated with gmsh	Exodus geometry visualized with paraview

Get started

• Get started with the README here

• Let us know if you have any troubles using it

• Think it could be better? Clone the repo, improve it and send a pull request

It was great working with Patrick on this project, I learned a lot about meshes and VTK. #notscaredofmeshesanymore

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