Element Types#

MyMesh infers the element type by the length of each element’s node connectivity, allowing for flexible handling of mixed element meshes. Some ambiguities exist between meshes of different Types (line, surf, vol), for example between a 4-node quadrilateral and a 4-node tetrahedron. These ambiguities get resolved by the mymesh.mesh.Type attribute or an optional Type input for relevant functions (see also mymesh.utils.identify_type()).

MyMesh primarily uses linear (first order) elements (e.g. 3 node tris, 4 node tets, etc.) but also has limited support for quadratic elements (e.g. 6 node tris, 10 node tets, etc.). Meshes can be converted to/from quadratic elements (see mymesh.converter), but not all functions are set up to handle meshes with quadratic elements

Element	Type	Number of Nodes
Edge (`edge`)	Line (`line`)	2
Quadratic Edge (`edge3`)	Line (`line`)	3
Triangle (`tri`)	Surface (`surf`)	3
Quadratic Triangle (`tri6`)	Surface (`surf`)	6
Quadrilateral (`quad`)	Surface (`surf`)	4
Quadratic Quadrilateral (`quad8`)	Surface (`surf`)	8
Tetrahedron (`tet`)	Volume (`vol`)	4
Quadratic Tetrahedron (`tet10`)	Volume (`vol`)	10
Pyramid (`pyr`)	Volume (`vol`)	5
Quadratic Pyramid (`pyr13`)	Volume (`vol`)	13
Wedge (`wdg`)	Volume (`vol`)	6
Quadratic Wedge (`wdg15`)	Volume (`vol`)	15
Hexahedron (`hex`)	Volume (`vol`)	8
Quadratic Hexahedron (`hex20`)	Volume (`vol`)	20