FEM Pre-processing.

During the FEM pre-processing:

• One FEM part is created from the corresponding MbD part.
• A FEM mesh is assigned to the FEM part.
• One or a set of joint FEM loads are created from the MbD Joints, and applied to the corresponding FEM part. These joint FEM loads are foundational components of the MbD-FEM coupling. They are in charge of:
• Filtering the FEM nodes belonging to the bearing surfaces, based on the CAD geometries.
• Distributing the MbD forces and torques among the adequate FEM nodes.
• Ensuring the distribution of the FEM loads is physically accurate.
• Applying the adequate profiles (sinusoidal, triangular, linear, etc), to the distributed FEM loads; depending on the type of joint and on the dimensions and type of CAD geometry.
• The d'Alembert force at each mesh volume element center of mass is computed, for each frame.
• The pre-processor creates a set of FEM input files for the FEM solver, one for each time-step of the MbD simulation.