HFSS15: Seeding the Mesh

In HFSS, mesh operations are optional mesh refinement settings that enable you to provide HFSS with engineering guidance based on your knowledge of the parts of the model geometry that are critical to the structure’s electromagnetic performance. Providing such guidance to HFSS prior to beginning the adaptive analysis process can reduce (sometimes extensively) the number of passes necessary to converge upon a field solution as well as the final number of tetrahedra in the mesh for that solution. Although adaptive analysis convergence targets areas where field behavior is found, refining the mesh using more than the standard criteria, such as material characteristics, can result in finding areas of critical field behavior as soon as the first few passes are solved.

The technique of guiding HFSS’s mesh construction is referred to as "seeding" the mesh. Seeding is performed using the Mesh Operations commands on the HFSS menu.

You can instruct HFSS to refine the length of tetrahedral elements on a surface or within a volume until they are below a certain value (length-based mesh refinement) or you can instruct HFSS to refine the surface triangle length of all tetrahedral elements on a surface or volume to within a specified value (skin depth-based mesh refinement.) These types of mesh operations can be defined at any time. If you apply them before the adaptive solution process, they are used to refine the initial mesh after it has been generated. You can also choose to apply mesh operations without generating a solution, in which case the mesh operations are applied to the current mesh.

In a few circumstances, you may also want to define a mesh operation that modifies HFSS’s surface approximation settings for one or more faces. Surface approximation settings are only applied to the initial mesh.