Geometric validation of a tape scale meshing tool for hydrogen tank modeling

A novel mesh generation tool is used to generate a mesh of a wound composite shell with conformal interfaces between overlapping tapes. Manufacturing defects and tapes dimensions are extracted from a tomography of the top of the dome. The meshing algorithm relies on a two-step strategy. First, a front representing the tape width is projected on a grid of the laying surface following the robot laying trajectories to obtain the localizations of the overlaps and the winding order. Then, a mesh of hexaedral elements is generated taking into account the height transitions at the tape overlaps. The original geometric approach is combined with physics-based heuristic methods to represent precisely the profile observed on the actual shells. The generated geometry is compared to multiple shells with different levels of complexity, at different scales.