A paper clip as simple as it is. It always is handy when we need to join paper sheets together. A soft metal wire is bended in such a way that when we insert a few paper sheets in-between the bended profile, it will act as a spring load pressing the paper sheets together.

Paper Clip

The mesher used in this case was NetGen with standard options:

Max Size: 1000
Growth Rate: 0.3
Nbr. Segments per Edge: 1
Nbr. Segments per Radius: 2

Resulting Mesh:

Node count: 80181
Triangle count: 25166
Tetrahedron count: 39417

Paper Clip tetrahedron Mesh

But what did NetGen actually do? It did a mesh but many questions should now start to appear. Some questions came to my mind, like what elements did it used, what is the general quality of the elements like for instance:

• Element quality criteria;
• Aspect ratio
• Jacobean
• Warping factor
• Maximum corner angle
• Skewness
• Orthogonal quality

Also I wonder what element types are used and where can I find documentation. I will try to understand this better in my next posts…