Patent ID: 7620532

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for generating data representing an object involved in a computer-implemented simulation of a physical experiment, comprising: a. receiving as input data describing physical characteristics of the object, said physical characteristics including geometric dimensions for components of the object; b. for a component of the object, generating data describing a base parent volume region that that extends at least beyond extents of the geometric dimensions of the component; c. generating data describing child volume regions produced by subdividing said base parent volume region into the child volume regions each having dimensions that are a fraction of the dimensions of the base parent volume region; d. examining the data describing each child volume region to determine whether vertices of each of the child volume regions are in the interior or exterior of the component; e. repeating (c) and (d) for each child volume that is not entirely in the interior or entirely in the exterior of the component to further subdivide each such child volume in order to produce data describing a set of child volume regions that do not meet the criteria for further subdivision; f. generating data for a particle positioned at a center of each child volume region in said set, wherein the data for each particle describes a mass density, velocity, pressure, stress and energy at a position of the component; and g. generating data that, based on dimensions of the child volume regions in said set, uniformly arranges the particles at positions to represent the component for use in the computer-implemented simulation.