Finite Element Meshes as Geometric Objects

ArcGIS 8 component architecture greatly expanded interface design and development opportunities. Research currently being conducted at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Mid-Pacific GIS Service Center allows features to be placed in a GIS that controls the position and size of finite elements. The code, which uses ArcObjects™ technology running in C++, assigns elevations to the finite element method mesh nodes and writes the mesh to a geodatabase.

The mesh can be represented in three dimensions and viewed in conjunction with ancillary datasets. This example depicts a small model area on the American River near Sacramento. The GIS was used to add breaklines (shown in red) to control the mesh node placement and element density. The water surface is color coded by depth. Additional utilities enable the element-node and node-x,y tables to be written directly from the geodatabase feature class.