[petsc-users] How to construct DMPlex of cells with different topological dimension?

[Jed Brown]

袁煕 <yuanxi at advancesoft.jp> writes:
> Well! All objects in this world could definitely be modeled as 3D volumes.
> But considering costs of meshing and following calculations, in most cases
> it is neither practical nor necessary. And in some specific cases, e.g., to
> model cell membranes, 2D membrane elements may behave better than 3D volume
> ones. It is therefore, in many cases, modeling should be much simplified
> and in some cases they could be modeled as 2D or 1D ones.

DMPlex can represent such meshes and we shouldn't hack around it by faking 3D elements (even if their cost might end up being negligible). As I understand it, the issue is that automatic interpolation doesn't support such meshes and perhaps existing readers can't create them either.

This means you either need to do the leg-work up front to create these meshes or someone (perhaps you) contribute to a reader or interpolation algorithm to enable your workflow. Even if you can't work on the library code for such support, creating a merge request with a clean test would be really helpful.