Advanced IGA Mesh Generation and Application to Structural Vibrations

In this chapter, we present a workflow for Isogeometric Analysis (IGA) that incorporates an advanced mesh generation method Otoguro et al. (Comput Fluids 158:189–200, 2017). The process is flexible and can be easily adjusted to accommodate challenging applications in computational mechanics. In addition, IGA is compared to the finite element (FE) method in terms of accuracy per degree-of-freedom in structural vibrations. The results obtained demonstrate that the use of NURBS meshes leads to faster convergence and higher accuracy compared to linear and quadratic FE meshes. A clearly defined workflow for mesh generation and significant advantages of IGA over FE in terms of per-degree-of-freedom accuracy make IGA more accessible, reliable, and attractive in applications of both academic and industrial interest. We note that the accuracy of a structural mechanics discretization, which may be assessed through eigenfrequency analysis, plays an important role in the overall accuracy of fluid–structure interaction computations.