OneCAD-Simulation/docs/architecture.md

Architecture

ModelCraft turns geometry into finite element models, writes them for the solvers engineers already use, and solves linear problems itself.

SolidCraft B-rep ──tessellate──▶ boundary surface ──▶ volume mesh ──▶ FE model ──▶ Abaqus .inp
 (solidcraft-kernel)           (welded, watertight,   tet (Delaunay)   materials,     Nastran .bdf
                                face-tagged)          hex (core goal)  sections,      LS-DYNA .k
                                                                       BCs, loads,  ──▶ own linear
                                                                       steps            solver

Crates and layers

cargo xtask layers enforces the table in xtask/src/layers.rs: a crate may depend only on crates in strictly lower layers.

Layer	Crate	Role	Status
L0	modelcraft-model	Solver-neutral FE model: nodes, elements by label; materials, sections, sets, BCs, loads and steps as they land. Knows no file format.	started
L1	modelcraft-geometry	The only door to SolidCraft: opens .solidcraft designs (rebuilt from their timeline, bodies with persistent face names), B-rep bodies, measures, tessellation into a face-tagged SurfaceMesh. No SolidCraft type in its API.	started
L1	modelcraft-mesh	Surface preparation (weld, watertightness, feature edges), robust predicates, Delaunay tetrahedralization and refinement, Voronoi-based optimization, hex meshing, quality metrics.	started
L1	modelcraft-solver	Element formulations, assembly, sparse linear static and modal solution.	planned
L1	modelcraft-decks	Abaqus input, Nastran bulk data and LS-DYNA keyword readers and writers, to and from model.	planned
L1	modelcraft-render	Display data (meshes, contour maps) without a GPU dependency.	planned
L2	modelcraft-doc	The document: geometry, mesh, model, results, history.	planned
L3	modelcraft-io	.modelcraft files, result files.	planned
L4	modelcraft-engine	Commands (CommandSpec), Session::execute with rollback and the panic guard, scripts.	started
L5	modelcraft-ui-egui, modelcraft-mcp	Desktop UI, control channel and MCP server.	planned
apps	modelcraft, modelcraft-cli, modelcraft-web	Desktop, command line, browser.	cli started

Rules beyond the layer order:

• Nothing below L5 uses egui, eframe, winit, wgpu or rfd.
• Only modelcraft-geometry uses solidcraft-*, pinned by rev in the workspace Cargo.toml. SolidCraft's [patch.crates-io] (its fixed truck crates) does not reach dependents, so the workspace repeats it from the same rev; bump both together.
• Everything below the apps builds for wasm32-unknown-unknown.

Meshing pipeline

1. Boundary surface. SolidCraft tessellates each body; every triangle carries its B-rep face, so feature edges and face-based loads and BCs survive meshing. Faces of an opened design also carry SolidCraft's persistent names (F2:side:l4, from the feature and sketch curve that made them), so a load on a named face follows it when the design is edited and opened again.
2. Surface preparation. Weld coincident vertices, check the surface is closed, manifold and consistently oriented, find feature edges (face boundaries, sharp dihedral angles).
3. Tetrahedral meshing. Bowyer–Watson Delaunay on Shewchuk's adaptive predicates (symbolic perturbation for degeneracies), boundary recovery by the robust constrained Delaunay method of Diazzi et al. 2023 (implicit Steiner points on indirect predicates, gift-wrapping fallback), so every boundary triangle and its B-rep face tag survives. Then constrained Delaunay refinement to a size field, ODT smoothing interleaved as in Tournois et al. 2009, and the Klingner–Shewchuk 2007 improvement schedule against slivers.
4. Hexahedral meshing (the core). Octree/grid dual all-hex first, the one family that meshes any input validly (Livesu et al. 2021 dual schemes, Pitzalis et al. 2021 refinement, Gao et al. 2019 feature projection and padding, Garanzha et al. 2021 untangling). Then hex-dominant by tet recombination (Pellerin et al. 2018), then polycube (DualCube labelling) for blocky parts; frame-field/integer-grid-map methods stay research. Validity uses a certified trilinear Jacobian check (Marschner et al. 2020), not corner Jacobians alone.
5. Quality. Scaled Jacobian, aspect ratio, dihedral angles; every generated mesh is checked for positive Jacobians and conserved volume before it reaches the model.

Commands

Every user-visible action is a CommandSpec in crates/engine/src/cmd/<area>.rs with a JSON form. Session::execute clones the model, runs the command under catch_unwind, and restores the model on an error or a panic; commands that changed the model are journalled, so the journal replays as a script.