A continuum mechanics based framework for optimizing boundary and finite element meshes associated with underground excavations—accuracy,efficiency and applications

A framework was developed to address the automatic optimization of the level of geometric detail required for stress analysis of underground excavations in mining, which was presented in the companion paper. The motivation for optimizing the mesh geometry stems from the over‐discretization of computational domain as the digital mine model is built while our knowledge of some of the input parameters is quite limited. Thus, the accuracy of the solution is not expected to be increased with a finely discretized mesh, only the computation time does. Therefore, it is acceptable if the results obtained from an optimized model have accuracy comparable to the uncertainty in input data (e.g. rock mass properties, geology, etc.). Although the mesh optimization framework automates the geometry optimization and reduces computation time, the accuracy of the solution from the resulting geometry must be evaluated to ensure the quality of the solution at the ‘region of interest’. Both a priori (mesh quality) and a posteriori (solution quality) measures are employed along with recording the mesh optimization time. Finally, the applicability of the mesh optimization framework is demonstrated by analysing a number of mining and civil engineering underground models. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.