Coreform Flex trimming robustness updates in 2025.3

This release features significant robustness improvements to the Coreform Flex trimming algorithm. Tet meshing is the incumbent fully-automatic meshing solution for complex geometries, but is still dependent on CAD characteristics allowing for the building of a valid surface mesh. The reality is that modern CAD often includes bad surfaces that cause a tri-mesh to fail. Coreform’s next-gen IGA trimming process is robust over many of these issues.

Internal testing on a repository of over 2000 customer parts was benchmarked against the tet meshing capabilities in Coreform Cubit and Flex trimming was found to be more robust than the tet mesher.

Complete release notes are available here.

Other Coreform Flex updates

Neo-Hookean elasticity

Coreform has implemented a two-parameter, isotropic hyper-elastic neo-Hookean material that converges to the linear elastic model in the small deformation limit.

Mechanical contact 

One of the promises of next-generation IGA has been that higher-order smooth bases could be more robust for challenging contact problems than traditional linear bases. The reality is that implementation of contact with these bases is highly complex and demanding. In this release, Coreform has an initial implementation of mechanical contact that works for both body-fitted and immersed flex approaches. This is the initial capability, and increased robustness and performance are being worked on.

Mooney-Rivlin elasticity

We have implemented the three-parameter isotropic hyperelastic Mooney-Rivlin material model. This also includes an extension of this model for nearly incompressible solids is available via a pressure stabilization approach.  More information can be found in our reference manual.

Neo-Hookean isotropic plasticity

This material model combines the neo-Hookean elasticity material model with a nonlinear isotropic rate-independent plasticity model based on J2 flow theory. 

Improved boundary condition workflow

Coreform Flex weakly enforces Dirischlet boundary conditions such as displacements. This eliminates the interdependence of boundary conditions, CAD, and mesh, but does require some parameters to be selected. In this release we have implemented automatic physics-based parameter selection that further simplifies the workflow.

Nonlinear continuation solver

This release adds an implicit static timestepping method based on numerical continuation that breaks a difficult nonlinear problem into a sequence of simpler nonlinear problems. This improves the ability to converge to difficult nonlinear problems. 

Coreform Cubit 2025.3 updates

Coreform Cubit updates include bug fixes and minor enhancements. Full release notes are available here.

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