Authors of iMesh

iMesh was conceived by Dr. Olivier Burdet as a solution to allow students to create and manipulate real Finite Element meshes within the short time that is typically allowed for exercises during the semester. This was an important requirement from the main sponsor of i-concrete, the EPFL project FIFO. The idea was from the beginning to create a very small and efficient applet that would not require any particular installation or type of computer to run. On the basis of the experience gained in writing the iCremona applet, it was clear that a web applet developed in Java was the solution.

Triangular meshing

Triangular meshing has long be recognized as an efficient and simple way to mesh two-dimensional domains. The Triangle program by Dr Jonathan Shewchuk of UC Berkeley is a word-wide reference for its efficiency and elegance. Its use, however, is not very simple, and its input format is not easy to read. In addition, while triangle creates very good meshes, and outputs the required information for further treatment in the perspective of Finite Element calculations, doing so requires some work. As a consequence, it was decided to develop a java applet based on the same principles than the triangle program (the authors are indebted to Prof. Shewchuk for his very clear papers and publications), but with an integrated user interface and a streamlined interface to some Finite Programs. The first Finite Element program is the iConc applet, authored by Dr Miguel Fernández Ruiz, whom we thank also for his patient explanations of the input file.

Implementation

The opportunity to actually implement the iMesh applet was given when Arpit Kumar, a young Computer Science major of IIT Kharagpur in India, inquired at EPFL for the possibility to make a summer internship, with a preference for the development of java applets. He worked from May to July of 2008 on a solid implementation of the main algorithms of Delaunay triangulation, area recognition, mesh generation, mesh improvement and mesh refinement. He also collaborated to the development of the iMesh user interface.

The iMesh applet was developed on PCs running Windows XP Pro SP2, using the Sun Netbeans IDE 6.0. It is currently deployed on the i-Concrete server (running IIS 7.0 under Windows Server 2008 SP1). The database back-end is MS-SQL Server 2008.