Mesh Element Types

CADFEKO supports segments, triangles, tetrahedra and voxels as mesh elements. The type of mesh element used to create a mesh is directly coupled to the solver method.

CADFEKO supports the following types of mesh elements:
Segments
A line segment consists of two vertices. Segments are the default type of mesh element to represent wires and are used for all solver methods.
Triangles
A triangle consists of three sides with three corner vertices. A curvilinear triangle consists of three sides with six vertices. Triangles are the default type of mesh element and is used for all solver methods, but excluding finite difference time domain (FDTD), finite element method (FEM) and uniform theory of diffraction (UTD).
Tetrahedra
A tetrahedron consists of four triangular faces, six edges and four corner vertices. Tetrahedral elements are used for volume equivalence principle (VEP) and finite element method (FEM) solver methods.
Voxels
A voxel is a cuboid on a grid in three-dimensional space. Voxels are the mesh element type used in conjunction with the FDTD solver method.


Figure 1. A model with voxel mesh gridlines indicating the size of the voxels.