A Technique for the Long Term Preservation of Finite Element Meshes

Finite element meshes are the basic data structures of engineering analyses and simulations. Unfortunately many different kinds of finite element mesh formats exist. These different formats can make it difficult to handle the meshes in several aspects, for example when the same simulation should be checked and validated by another program or to preserve these data for long term. For both cases the conversion of finite element meshes can be a solution, however there is another problem in this case, that the size of the meshes are constantly increasing and meshes with over a million elements are commonly used nowadays. This paper would like to discuss how such large meshes can be converted in a parallel fashion and it also presents how this method can be used in the preservation and storage of finite element meshes.