Parameterization of a spherical surface or solid

Any thoughts on creating a solid of revolution that doesn't have the
surface parameterization coming to a point on the poles?

 

in sections, like a soccer ball?

 

That sort of works with a sphere, but if I go to an ellipsoid it is
harder to do.

 

I think you would still get the degenerate parameterization around the
poles. The problem is that most surface creation algorithms are based
on a rectilinear 2D approach that doesn't map well to some surfaces.

I spent several hours on a problem with splitting a model and found
that SW can't get away from the underlying surface parameterization,
even with the fill command.

In the cases I am working on a sphere is subdivided into 7 "chunks", 6
of which are identical, and one is a cube. In this way the sphere can
be hex meshed with a very nice, well behaved brick element.

 

Can you give any more details about the analysis you are trying to
perform (loading, material, program)?

I wouldn't fret too much about getting perfectly rectangular bricks.
There are other ways to get decent results.

If you're doing solids curved surfaces, a P-tet mesh should work fine.
Keep locally refining mesh until you get convergence in regions with
high stress gradients.

Another strategy is to cut your sphere by layers, with an outer layer
that is at least 4 elements deep in thickness. Auto quad-mesh the
inner surface of the shell and offset the quad elements outward. Mesh
the sphere interior with a tet mesh.

 

This is a contact problem. Bricks allow me to cut down on the dof while
still getting good accuracy. I'm breaking up a sphere to get seven six
sided chunks. It's the only way to get a decent mesh providing the
underlying surfaces don't create problems. In this way there is very
little distortion in the bricks so I can use the 8 noded variety which
helps convergence.

The problem with trying to refine a P-Tet mesh in a non-linear problem
with contact should be obvious. The high stress gradients move around
from iteration to iteration.

In this problem there is a ball bearing between two other surfaces.