[Trilinos-Users] writing programmatically-built STK mesh and skin to exodus files

[Roth, Philip C.]

Hello,

I am trying to build an STK mesh programmatically, and then output it to an Exodus file.  I've been at it longer than I care to admit, with little success, and feel like I'm missing something obvious.  Perhaps someone can point me in the right direction.

I want to define a volumetric mesh of tet4s and write it to an Exodus file.  By following examples in the STK distribution, I *think* I can successfully build the mesh using MetaData and BulkData objects.  After that, I'm at a loss as to how to write it to an Exodus file.  I've looked at using StkMeshIoBroker but can't see a way to associate my MetaData/BulkData objects with an output mesh.  I also can't see how to use Ioss classes/functions directly to output this mesh.  At one point, I thought I might be able to use Iogn to generate a mesh that I would throw away and replace with my own, but Iogn seems to be limited in the types of mesh elements it supports and tet4s aren't supported.

I also need to have the exposed faces of my mesh defined as face elements.  I've seen the examples on how to skin a mesh, and have done that successfully, but because of limitations in visit's handling of Exodus files I think I need these faces to be represented as a surface mesh in a separate file, not a sideset in the 3D mesh's file.  I can't see how to convert the sideset I get from skinning the mesh to a surface of triangles in 3D space, and write that out to an Exodus file.

Can anyone point me in the right direction for addressing either of these problems?

Regards,
Phil Roth

-- 
Philip C. Roth | +1 865 241-1543 | http://ft.ornl.gov/~rothpc