Nowadays in the field of additive manufacturing, simulation is a necessary part of developments. Process simulations, among others, are used for predicting deformation, stresses or thermal behavior. Numerical process simulations are usually done using the method of finite elements. In this method one needs a mesh of finite elements representing the considered part. Generating these meshes can be very time-consuming and wasteful of effort. To improve the working process a method was developed to automatically generate a finite element mesh. This mesh is, according to the process, layer based. Furthermore it is homogeneous in its element size and continuous through all layers. The original machine data can be taken as slice data, on which the mesh generation is based. The generated mesh contains only hexagonal elements and the shape of the mesh is close to that of the original part.
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