Particle Bulk Result to CAD

Submitted by uhelfenstein on Fri, 10/23/2015 - 10:24

Hi,

The task is to bring the result of the particle bulk back to CAD. My idea is that I know the position of all the particles (x y z) and have therefore a volume point cloud. Out of this point cloud it should be possible to create a surface or a volume (e.g. an STL). I know that there is software available who deal with point clouds and created meshes out of it (e.g. MeshLab). But as far as I understand it is only to create meshes out of a surface point cloud and not a volume point cloud.
Any idea about a tool chain to solve this problem? Any software or work flow? Or also how to create out of this volume point cloud a surface point cloud?

Thanks for any suggestions,
Urs

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aaigner's picture

aaigner | Fri, 10/23/2015 - 11:11

Hi Urs,

paraview has an build-in filter named Delauney3d. You can generate a volume mesh from your particles. Unfortunately, I don't know if you can export this volume as an stl.

Bests
Andreas

uhelfenstein | Tue, 11/17/2015 - 09:20

Hey Andreas,

Thank you for the hint with Delauney3d. I was able to create a mesh of the particles. If I chose the alpha value of the Delauney3d filter in the range of a little more than the diameter of the particles, I got a mesh of the bulk material and the particles in the air are ignored if the distance between them is bigger than than the alpha value.
It was not possible to save the result of the Delauney3d filter in an STL file. After some research I found a possibility. The problem was that Delauney3d creates a volume mesh and STL handles only surface mesh. Therefore, I used an an additional filter to extract the surface of the volume mesh. The result of this filter can be saved (File -> Save Data...) as an STL which I could import in the CAD.

So thanks again for your help.
BR,
Urs